What I Learned Through My High School Experience

As we come closer and closer to the end of our high school careers, there are moments that we begin to reflect on. Such as wondering why we procrastinate and why it took so long to finish an English assignment or complete our Membean for the week. These things we’ve been telling ourselves to do for weeks but just keep holding it off “until the next day”. I’m one of those people. As the years of high school have past, my motivation to get things done has grown smaller and smaller as the want for graduation grows immensely. But throughout high school, I’ve also learned three important things. I learned that failing isn’t the end of the world, as long as you are trying. You can learn from the mistakes and make a change, but if you aren’t giving any effort then you will continue to fail to learn. I always thought that failing meant the end, but it’s just an extra step to success. Putting yourself out there to succeed will get you to the end mark, as long as you can try, there’s nothing that can stop you.

This goes along with the desire to be perfect and wanting to give up when you fail. Nobody can be perfect, it’s what makes us different. We all have our moments of what we feel is defeat, but that is how we differ from others. It isn’t the end, we just keep going. It was December of Sophomore year when I found this to be true. We were on Christmas break and one morning I woke up with the most excruciating pain I have ever felt. My mom was getting ready to leave for work and she came in and saw I was balled up on my bedroom floor. I told her that I had a huge burst of pain in my side and she asked me if I wanted to wait until the doctor’s office opened, or if I wanted to just go to the hospital. I never experienced pain like this before so I told her I wanted to go to the emergency room. Come to find out that I had a large cyst on my ovary that was cutting off blood flow and I needed an emergency surgery to get it taken out. Once I got out, they said it was going to be a slow recovery. My parents were glad that it happened over Christmas break because by the time we would have to go back to school, I should be fine. Right? Wrong. The first few days I camped out on the couch in the living room and with the pain meds I had to take, I slept most of the time. A few days after that I wanted to start to move more. I had absolutely no energy to do anything so I stopped trying. As vacation came to an end, I was told I was going to need to take another week from school. I didn’t think it was a big deal because it was just a longer vacation for me. Again, I was wrong. Once I got back to school, everyone was cramming in homework because the semester was coming to an end. The end was coming closer and closer and I had piles and piles of work to do. I was working on homework for hours each night and I still didn’t feel like I was going to finish in time. I wanted to give up. I thought that if I couldn’t finish one thing, then there wasn’t a point in finishing anything else. I wanted everything to be done perfect, or just not at all. That was when my mom told me that it’s nearly impossible for anyone to be perfect. She told me that if I applied myself and gave the best effort I could, then I would finish. Even if it wasn’t perfect, I still made the effort to make it to that finish line. Throughout that situation, that was when I realized high school was going to be a long and stressful four years.

I moved to the Oak Hill community the beginning of Freshman year. Everyone and everything was new to me, especially since it was the first day of high school. From that first day, I met the people that I am friends with today and throughout these four years, we have made some unforgettable memories. From family members and family friends I’ve always been told that high school will be the best four years of my life and to take up every second of it. I do believe in taking up every second of high school, because I remember thinking that after freshman year it was going to take forever for graduation to come. But senior year came and hit me like a bus. I didn’t know what to expect. In reality, I hope that high school isn’t the best four years of my life, because I think we can all agree that there have been some points of high school that have been awkward and stressful. From being the awkward and shy freshman that doesn’t know even a little bit of what high school is made of; to the awkward relationships, or encounters that are made in the hallways once things have been over. And to the stressful late nights trying to finish homework that we remembered is due the next day. But even though the friends and memories I made will always last forever, I just hope that when the future comes, it keeps throwing challenges and keeps on making life exciting. So I do give thanks to those awkward and stressful stages in life, because it has made me prepared for what can come next.

This doesn’t just go out to the Class of 2018, for when the future comes and we get to start all over. This also goes out to the underclassmen who will be going through what we went through and hopefully they can do it a different way then we did. But in the end, we’ve all succeeded in our own ways and our time has come to start a new chapter of our lives. 

Photo from: foter.com