Postmortem: Grieving the High School Years

Denial

I have spent two-thirds of my life here in this school. When I was six years old, my parents put me in the preschool here in hopes of giving an “American education” for their child. Then, after leaving in sixth grade to Canada, I arrived back to SAS in grade ten, to finish my high school years in this building. And this is where my most recent memories are.

My time in high school has been tumultuous, to say the least. I’ve been part of my fair share of drama, which has honestly made me disliked by many. But at the same time, I was always disconnected from everyone else. I would be the last person to learn about the newest whatever-it-is, and the last person to understand an inside joke. I don’t have any Snapchat, TikTok, or Instagram accounts. I’ve pretty much lived under a rock these past few years. And yes, it was mostly by choice. I dislike all of the attention on me.

Anger

I’ve missed out on the “high school experience”, the glorious, Netflix-worthy orgy of varsity sports, classmate beef, promposals, pep rallies, spin-the-bottle at 3am parties, “the time X cheated on Y”, hallway fights, and the gossip which ties it all together.

To be honest, I hate it all. It disgusts me. Why does such drama have to be such a  necessary part of the high school experience? Sure, maybe as an outsider I won’t understand. Maybe all of this drama and lore is what makes high school less boring. But people who spend all of their time gossiping, the kids whose lives become the lives of others, it’s pathetic. The things which other people find interesting don’t interest me. 

I think people underestimate how much others care about their personal lives, but overestimate how much I care. Every time something remotely interesting happens in their lives, my classmates feel the urge to whip out their phones and take blurry photos of themselves, all captioned with the latest update and ready to send it to a dozen other people. Yes, maybe others may be interested in whatever crap is being sent to them, but do I care? Do I care that you’re staying up until 3 am working on some project? Do I want to listen to your rant about how you hate a classmate? Why should I know who’s dating who, or what the newest trend is? Do I have a vested interest in the outcome? These things really don't apply to me. I simply don’t care. I don’t care about this high school experience.

Bargaining

Still, if I could start again, I could maybe change things. Restart the high school life, but do it right this time. Maybe if I play again, I’ll get a better outcome.

In the TV show Family Guy, there is one episode where the main characters Brian and Stewie go back in time to find a tennis ball. However, changing one single thing in the past, such as the location of the ball, somehow led to a chain of events where 9/11 never happened, George W. Bush lost the 2004 election, the Confederate States of America was reformed, and nuclear war broke out. A completely different outcome, because of one small change in the past. 

Sometimes I wonder if, three years ago, I changed something small—being late to school on one day, taking a different path to one of my classes—and it resulted in a very different future for me. In an alternate world, I could be the big, egotistic varsity jock who goes to bars and gets in fights every night. Or I could be the lonely, nerdy kid who reads books by himself during lunch but gets into MIT. Alternatively, I might not be in the school altogether, having dropped out after a few months and living in my parents’ basement playing video games and snacking on Doritos all day. A futuristic, time-bending form of roulette. 

If I could go back in the past and change that one tiny thing, would I do it? Would I take the risk to change the status quo? Go all in on red? Maybe. I might leave it up to chance to see if my life gets better or worse. But that’s not possible, is it? 

Depression

Maybe this is it. Maybe that’s what my life has led up to. Maybe the problem is me. This might have been my way of coping with my own intrinsic problems, slandering and criticizing others in a desperate attempt to change the past. But if anything, the past is unchangeable. 

And maybe all of the superficial things I hate about high school, the drama and the lore, is how others cope as well. Coping with the high school experience. Maybe the outside world is so intimidating and scary that they rely on this as fuel. To be fair, what more do you expect when you throw a thousand insecure, hormone-addled teens trying to figure out their lives into one location for four years?

The truth is, I can’t go back in time and redo my high school years. That’s just simply not how life and time works. It’s all over, then. You threw away your life, all of the opportunities which were presented to you on a silver platter. All the things you could’ve done but didn’t do are now gone. The sky was the limit, but you decided to dig into a hole and stay there. You are living a paradox: on one hand, you slander all of the defining events of high school and call it meaningless and vapid, but at the same time you long to be part of the very things you criticize in your desperate attempt to feel like you’re a part of something bigger. I don’t use the word “failure” lightly, but maybe that’s what it is. All a failure.

Acceptance

But maybe I just have to accept that. I was never a believer in fate, as I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my own life. But, what if is fate? Everything happens for a reason. God does not play dice. 

Now, as I leave behind my high school experience, I’m once again in control of my life. Yes, I still loathe all of the things about high school, but it has certainly been memorable, if that’s even the right word. I’m a smarter, wiser person because of all of my experiences. And yes, I can’t go back and change my life to experience high school in the way I wanted, but even if I could, there is no guarantee that my life right now will be better. The ball may have landed on black, and you might have lost everything. Your life right now is, objectively, good. Don’t try to trade it with something else.

So, live life without regrets. What’s the point of having them when you literally can’t change the past? If you care so much about not wasting time with meaningless and superficial things, stop caring about the past. Our lives are the sum of our choices, and the choices I made have already led me here. Out of all the trillions and trillions of possibilities, I’m here, and this is the path I’ve taken. You can only connect the dots looking backwards, but you can put the dots where you want looking forwards.

Now that this is the last week of high school, I don’t feel any remorse or sadness. Yes, this is the building I’ve spent close to twelve years in, but the truth is, parting with it and all of the memories made inside of it is easy. This is just a fragment of my past, and I want to leave it all behind in search of the future.

So goodbye, cruel world. I’ll see you on the other side.