Well, there ya have it folks. I am officially done with high school. It honestly hasn't fully sunken in yet. A part of me still feels like at the end of summer I'll be gearing up to another year in the hollowed, cement walls of my high school crammed in with about three thousand other students. It doesn't seem like that in the fall I'll be moving into a dorm on a campus in a little mountain town that has one stop light (they tried to put in a second one, but the town thought that would be too much haha.) The only thing that really has sunk in is that I am so very ready for whatever my future has in store for me.
Yet before I jump full on into college mode, I think it'd be worth going back one last time and publicly stating what I learned in high school, because I think I've learned even more than I realized I did. I guess for starters high school taught me that having a few friends is a whole lot better than having a group of friends that don't really care about you and will turn on you after any little mistake you make. I made quite a few mistakes in high school...haha more than I'd even like to admit, but there's been only about two people who I have stuck by me through all of them, and it took me until senior year to realize that. So,sure I don't have sleepovers every weekend with a group of girls or have massive group messages blowing up my phone every few minutes, but at the end of the day I get to look back on the hours spent at the pool or watching movies with a few people that make my heart smile bigger than my face ever could. And I wouldn't trade that for the world.
The next thing high school for sure taught me is that you have to learn how to make yourself happy. One of my biggest mistakes that I made time and time again in the past four years was looking to other people for my happiness. Whether it was a boy or a group of girls or a director or a grade in a class I was always relying on other people to make me feel good about myself or to give me happiness and joy. That was the reason I honestly didn't start to feel truly happy until the very end of my senior year when I finally took my happiness back from everyone I had handed it over to. I took it back and gave it back to myself and to God. Since then, I have been the happiest and most content I have been since way before I can even remember.
The last big thing that I want to take away from high school is that, high school really wasn't meant to last forever. The friendships you make there don't need to carry on for the rest of your life, they are needed more as bridges teaching you and showing you the path to better and stronger friendships you will make in the future. The drama and the heartbreak and the football games all will amount to a dusty photo album you only pull out every 10 years before shoving it back on the shelf with some remark about how you wish you could fit in to that size jeans again. I see now that graduation wasn't the end of all I've ever known, it was the beginning of the world I am so ready to meet.
Well look at that, I actually get to walk into college saying I did learn more than that the cafeteria food is the number one killer of 9th graders and that there isn't actually a pool under the gym floor. :)
xoxo K
