“I’m not done with you. You still have the rest of our life” is what I tell myself in my last two months as a high school senior. As the day of graduation draws ever closer, I find myself thinking what my curious but self-conscious freshman self would say and ask me if we were to talk to each other now. High school has been an academically challenging time for me as I took as many advanced classes as I felt comfortable with. But something I found to be more challenging than the classes I took was simply knowing what it meant to be a human being and how it felt to be one.
As silly as it sounds, I was genuinely very curious about what my purpose was and confused about my identity. In both my freshman and sophomore years, I was a part of an all-guy friend group where we chatted and played soccer on the grass during lunch. I never felt entirely part of the group, just a floater. The guys were nice people. They always tried to include me in what they did. But at the end of the day, I felt like just a floater getting by. I began to wonder what it felt like to be someone to someone else.
I have always been an observant person and to satisfy my curiosity, I began to observe as an outsider how people I saw acted and spoke to each other. I enjoy seeing people have genuine acceptance of others’ flaws in strong friendships. During that time, I had my own flaws, like my persistent stuttering, that many still recognize me by, and I defined myself by the things I try not to be. As I observed from afar, I began to accept with myself that maybe being flawed isn’t so bad after all. The more answers I found, the more questions I had about the complexity of being a person.
Before being a junior, I hardly remember anything that I did. I took my classes and got good grades in each one, but each day blurred into each other. Each day was a routine and in an inescapable loop. I grew bored of the predictability of life, and that’s when I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.
Junior year was my most memorable year. It was the year where I made my first genuine best friend, who was a girl, and we developed into a romantic relationship. I felt that I was already too ambitious to try to understand what friends were to be, but being in a relationship, I was able to figure out things I never thought I would. It felt surreal to have someone to accept who I was with all my flaws. It was equally as unusual that I reciprocated those same feelings and acceptance back. This is when I realized that I felt like my own human being.
As I am a senior, I realize that I have felt closer to the people I associate with. Especially with my group in Clarion, I realized that I had my own specific people who I could hang out with and always have a memorable time. More people in the past few months told me that I was their friend, and I even had a group of people in my calculus class tell me that they’ll miss me once we graduate. I was in awe at just how whole as a human being I felt. Although I don’t have my full answer to my original questions, I feel a lot more confident that I’m getting closer to it.
All that I mentioned prior to this is an oversimplification of what high school was like for me. Maybe it was over-analytical for me to try to find out what it means to be human while in high school. Maybe it was foolish for me to ask so many questions about being someone in high school. I was asking questions that probably even some elderly don’t know the answers to themselves. But I don’t have regrets for interpreting everything the way that I did.
