What I Learned Too Late: On School Spirit
Being a new freshman, I was thrust into a brand new world. There were so many ‘rules’, rules that I’m sure many of you, either having been new in freshman year or not knowing any school other than SAS, are familiar with. I couldn’t sit in the second-floor cafeteria because that was for upperclassmen. Even walking through that area to get to the sandwich shop scared me, like one of them was going to jump out and attack me just for walking past their table. I couldn’t go straight to class during the ten-minute break between classes, because then I’d be walking without friends. One thing I can tell you did NOT make you ‘cool’ was jumping up and down during assemblies when the MC told you to. I was occupied with ‘making my mark’ in a way. Coming from a school I had just spent four years in, I knew who my friends were, I knew who I was, and I completely lost that confidence walking into SAS. Every school talks about the ‘community’ their school fosters, but such a broad boast was something I always glazed over. Out of four different international schools I’ve been to in my life, all of them have used some sort of speech about community during orientation, but not a single one of them really stuck with me.
In my sophomore year, I was a little more comfortable. I had friends that I had spent the previous year with, but that meant I had things to lose. I was worried about people’s opinions of me, whether it be a random passerby or a good friend. It got to the point where I knew what my place was in the friendgroup, I knew my friendgroup’s place in the school, and I settled into a daily routine at school. I knew where we met during the 10-minute break, and I knew where we sat during lunch. The introduction of the new cafeteria and the perch, however, led to a social shakeup. Where were the freshmen going to sit now that the bottom cafeteria was the robotics lab? How would the perch play into this? One time, I went to sit at our normal place, and everyone was leaving. I asked them why, and they said they wanted to sit at the perch. I didn’t understand why; it was far away, and the food was worse, but I went. Everything was being done for others, not myself. I needed to be someone people wanted to be friends with because of how cool and chill I was. Maybe in my mind, I was enjoying the relay races and the random “donuts with the deans”, but I couldn’t show that. Eventually, inward thoughts became outward actions, and I began a dive into cynicism. It wasn’t healthy, and it absolutely wasn’t where I’d wanted myself to be a year into high school.
When I became a junior, it was grades, grades, grades. Why would I go to an assembly when I had a test next block? Eagle day was a waste of time, because it was taking time away from my revision. And why should I give even more effort and pretend to like the school that was putting me through all this? I was far too cynical to care about anything other than grades, and a lot of my classmates had the same issue. This began to slowly rot my mental health away as well. I had such a negative viewpoint on high school that I couldn’t find the fun in it. I began to neglect relationships with friends in order to get a few extra minutes studying during lunch. At the time, I felt like that’s what I should have been doing, but I ended up drifting away from friends and feeling even worse about myself.
As a senior, I realized I had just, in a sense, wasted my high school experience. Not in a physical sense, thinking things like “I should have joined that club” or “I should have hung out with my friends that weekend”, but more in a mindset sense. I really just went through 3 years of high school, hating high school. I hated the academic stress it gave me, I hated the way it made me change myself, but looking back, I can’t believe how ridiculous that hate was. How did I only remember the bad stuff? It was the best time of my entire life. I just spent the last 3 years seeing my favorite people on the planet daily, with something new to talk about or laugh about every day, but the abundance of it kept me from realizing how valuable the ability to have that was. I wish I could have explained these things to myself. I wish I could have known the thing that I kept hearing from my parents and older students, “You won’t know how much you miss high school until you miss high school.” That was something one of my best friends who graduated a few years ago told me, and I understand it now. So I implore you all. Don’t go through school hating it. Yes, there are some parts that you won’t like, but thats how life is sometimes. Go through high school looking forward to the next day, the next month, the next semester, and your experience will be all the better for it.