"The things I miss most about high school are the daily experiences and discomforts" --Margaret Gray, 11th Grade
I was supposed to be getting ready to go on a retreat for school when I heard the news. I hadn’t started to pack even though we were supposed to leave in a few days. I heard two periods before the official announcement that we were getting that Friday, March 13th off of school, and when I told my friends they didn’t believe me. I asked them if they wanted to hang out that weekend but they were all busy. Now I know that would’ve been the last time I could’ve seen them without social distancing. I wish I had taken that day, and the week after it before people realized that things were getting serious, and experienced the things about the world that I can’t now. Instead, I slept a lot and hoped we didn’t have to go back to school until after Thanksgiving break.
I’m not the type to get too emotional about quarantine. I’m pretty introverted, and the time has been good for me. I’ve grown as a person. At the beginning of quarantine I spent most of my time starting at my ceiling, waiting for time to pass, and I realized a lot about who I am. I came to terms with friendships that were ending, and accepted it. I came to terms with how I’ve changed as a person in the last year. I readjusted my ideas of right and wrong instead of just listening to what people around me were saying. I completed a lot of huge projects. I repainted my bedroom. I started a garden (and subsequently killed it the second school started and I couldn’t sit in it all day.) I learned about my favorite foods and how to cook them. I’ve adjusted to online school and the freedom it allows me. Still, even though my days aren’t torture, and even though I’m grateful for the time to think quarantine has given me, I miss the everyday of highschool.
Growing up, all the media I’ve ever seen tells us how important high school is. It’s supposed to be the best time of our lives, a time where we are free to do whatever we want, learn about ourselves, make lifelong friends. The impact of high school on the rest of adult life is portrayed as massive. Countless movies romanticize, glamorize, and dramatize it. Even before the pandemic, I felt lacking in my own high school experience. Now, that feeling is exponentially more intense. I feel like I’m missing out on everything, and there aren’t any redos. At the end of the day, there are only four years of high school. I’ve already missed one, and unless the school changes its online policy for second semester it’s looking like it will be two. There will be things that I will never be able to experience, situations I will never find myself in, and stories I will never be able to tell.
The things I miss most about highschool are the daily experiences and discomforts. I miss being in a hurry to get places, running to catch the bus, running to school from the bus, and trying to calculate the fastest route to get to class so I wasn’t late. I miss doing my homework last minute and sitting in the back of first period English. I miss having a headache and taking Advil from one of my friends. I miss running into people I know in the hallways and having brief, awkward conversations until one of us made up an excuse to get going. I miss being embarrassed when I dropped something in a quiet classroom, or when someone overheard me talking about them, or when I pronounced something wrong during a reading.
My friends who are juniors are having similar experiences. They miss club meetings and events, random things about school that just can’t be recreated, and above all having conversations and interacting with people their age. My friends who are seniors, on the other hand, are having a very different kind of anxiety about their futures--they stand to miss the milestones of high school that are popularized by media, like prom and graduation. If things continue this way, they also stand to miss their freshman years of college, and even more important events in their lives.
I’m worried that I’ll miss prom and graduation, but at the same time, time feels so immeasurable. Sometimes I can’t even remember what life was like before quarantine. Other times, quarantine feels like it has only lasted a few weeks. No matter who I talk to, they all feel like it’s endless, and worse, that there isn’t any foreseeable change to the state of things. I’ve never been someone to feel either pessimistic or positive about the future. My attitude has always been that whatever’s going to happen will happen, and worrying about it is useless. But now, I feel differently for the first time in my life: I can’t think of a positive outcome of this situation. I can’t imagine an America where we collectively solve the corona virus and go back to how things were. Maybe if we had been serious about it in the first few months things would have been different, but we’re always going backwards into the strictness of social distancing rules, never forwards.
I can’t imagine a world where America beats Covid-19. Some people still don’t even think it’s real. I don’t want to let myself get my hopes up about there ever being an ending of the virus because it seems completely unattainable. A universe where I have small gatherings seems impossible, so it’s hard to even imagine a world where we collectively eliminated the threat of the virus. I want to be wrong. I want to be hopeful about the future of America, and the future of my graduating class, but there isn’t really any way to know.
I’m not the type to get too emotional about quarantine. I’m pretty introverted, and the time has been good for me. I’ve grown as a person. At the beginning of quarantine I spent most of my time starting at my ceiling, waiting for time to pass, and I realized a lot about who I am. I came to terms with friendships that were ending, and accepted it. I came to terms with how I’ve changed as a person in the last year. I readjusted my ideas of right and wrong instead of just listening to what people around me were saying. I completed a lot of huge projects. I repainted my bedroom. I started a garden (and subsequently killed it the second school started and I couldn’t sit in it all day.) I learned about my favorite foods and how to cook them. I’ve adjusted to online school and the freedom it allows me. Still, even though my days aren’t torture, and even though I’m grateful for the time to think quarantine has given me, I miss the everyday of highschool.
Growing up, all the media I’ve ever seen tells us how important high school is. It’s supposed to be the best time of our lives, a time where we are free to do whatever we want, learn about ourselves, make lifelong friends. The impact of high school on the rest of adult life is portrayed as massive. Countless movies romanticize, glamorize, and dramatize it. Even before the pandemic, I felt lacking in my own high school experience. Now, that feeling is exponentially more intense. I feel like I’m missing out on everything, and there aren’t any redos. At the end of the day, there are only four years of high school. I’ve already missed one, and unless the school changes its online policy for second semester it’s looking like it will be two. There will be things that I will never be able to experience, situations I will never find myself in, and stories I will never be able to tell.
The things I miss most about highschool are the daily experiences and discomforts. I miss being in a hurry to get places, running to catch the bus, running to school from the bus, and trying to calculate the fastest route to get to class so I wasn’t late. I miss doing my homework last minute and sitting in the back of first period English. I miss having a headache and taking Advil from one of my friends. I miss running into people I know in the hallways and having brief, awkward conversations until one of us made up an excuse to get going. I miss being embarrassed when I dropped something in a quiet classroom, or when someone overheard me talking about them, or when I pronounced something wrong during a reading.
My friends who are juniors are having similar experiences. They miss club meetings and events, random things about school that just can’t be recreated, and above all having conversations and interacting with people their age. My friends who are seniors, on the other hand, are having a very different kind of anxiety about their futures--they stand to miss the milestones of high school that are popularized by media, like prom and graduation. If things continue this way, they also stand to miss their freshman years of college, and even more important events in their lives.
I’m worried that I’ll miss prom and graduation, but at the same time, time feels so immeasurable. Sometimes I can’t even remember what life was like before quarantine. Other times, quarantine feels like it has only lasted a few weeks. No matter who I talk to, they all feel like it’s endless, and worse, that there isn’t any foreseeable change to the state of things. I’ve never been someone to feel either pessimistic or positive about the future. My attitude has always been that whatever’s going to happen will happen, and worrying about it is useless. But now, I feel differently for the first time in my life: I can’t think of a positive outcome of this situation. I can’t imagine an America where we collectively solve the corona virus and go back to how things were. Maybe if we had been serious about it in the first few months things would have been different, but we’re always going backwards into the strictness of social distancing rules, never forwards.
I can’t imagine a world where America beats Covid-19. Some people still don’t even think it’s real. I don’t want to let myself get my hopes up about there ever being an ending of the virus because it seems completely unattainable. A universe where I have small gatherings seems impossible, so it’s hard to even imagine a world where we collectively eliminated the threat of the virus. I want to be wrong. I want to be hopeful about the future of America, and the future of my graduating class, but there isn’t really any way to know.
