All the Years

Good Morning white two, and Mrs. Chick.   We made it through sophomore speech and poetry out loud thinking we’d never have to do anything like this again but here we go, the unexpected, yet shortly dreaded commencement speech.  The speech where you could either make a fool of yourself, put the class to sleep with how boring your life was for four years, or you could seriously offend some people. Let’s jump right into it.  

Okay, let’s be honest, this wasn’t at all like the movies.  At Least not for me anyway. There was no big bad bully who tried to rule the school, that’s usually quite the jock and school hero.  There was no big musical breakouts in the hallways, well, of course, except on the last day of school when Mr. Zuis is always blasting High School Musical’s “What time is it” as students were rushing out the doors.  There was also no big emotional love story, just emotional girls crying in the bathrooms over drama that didn’t even matter the next day. Anyways, let’s go through the years and see what happened in the world of high school for Molly Flaherty.

Ah Freshman year, the year of new beginnings, the year to have a fresh start, to meet new people, and also the year to be the most lost that you’ve ever been in your whole life.  Most people will usually say that they’ve done plenty of embarrassing things throughout their high school years but I honestly didn’t. All I can really say for my embarrassing moments in high school was that on the second day of school I asked a senior if he was a teacher because I had no clue where my classes were. I mean, come on, the guy had a full grown beard!  When I entered my freshman year I had a lot of friends, I was pretty much friends or acquaintances with everyone in our grade. As there year went on I kept many of those friends but I also realized that the sports were becoming very political, especially in our small town of whos who, this was a huge factor in kids dividing up into cliques.  As a freshman I was put on the JV softball team, as most freshman should be. I was happy playing on JV because that meant I was getting more playing time and not sitting the bench on varsity. I was the only pitcher for JV so I really got a chance to develop my skills and become a better team player. I got injured freshman year which caused me to be out for three weeks which in a jv game schedule is only like three games.   Freshman year was probably the most confusing year for me because it was hard keeping up with the workload because it was very different from middle school but also seeing my friends disperse into different cliques was hard too.

Sophomore year was pretty boring for me.  The workload was lighter because we were focusing on bigger projects rather than a bunch of small ones.  We had sophomore speech which I finished early and got a 98 on which I am still very proud of to this day.  Friend groups stayed about the same that year but we finally weren’t the youngest kids in school. Well, there isn’t really much more to say about sophomore year, it was pretty uneventful for me, so let’s move on the the most important year for me, junior year.

Okay,  some of you are probably wondering why junior year was the most important year for me and some of you may already know.  Now most of you may already know this if you follow me on any sort of social media, or well now if you see me around school between classes but I’m gay.  This was very hard for me to tell people and honestly was probably one of the best decisions in my life to tell people. Now, this is where I found my life to get a little more interesting.  Fun fact, if you come out as gay, suddenly everyone wants to be your friend, which wasn’t really a good thing for me though because as all of you already know I do not like people. But all of those “friends” finally went away and I actually got to see who my true friends are and, I mean, there’s only maybe two or three but those are the people who will stay by my side probably for the rest of my life.  Another huge part to my junior year was that I met my best friend. Her name was Francesca, she flew all the way over here from Italy to live with me and my family for a year, which I would never have the guts to do then to live there for a year, in a place where they don’t speak your first language, pretty much at all.  She fit in very fast here at Oak Hill even though she had some funky styles at times. She very quickly because like a sister to me and I love her very much and hope she comes back to visit soon. Hosting an exchange student was probably the best and most valued experience in my life.

Senior year.  Yay! We finally did it!  This year has been crazy!   Between applying for colleges, scholarships, being recruited and just struggling to survive senior year just to finally get  out of this place, let’s be honest it was rough. Not to mention a lot of us have jobs or play travel sports or even multiple sports.  But we did it, I was always told to enjoy my high school years, to be involved because they would be the best years of my life. Whoever said that, they were way off.  

High School is not what you’d expect it to be.   I came into high school with these big expectations that it was going to be the best years of my life, but they weren’t.  Don’t get me wrong there were some good times but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. So, thank you all for the weird memories here at Oak Hill High School, and I will see about half of you at CMCC next year where I’ll be majoring in life sciences and you can catch me at the new turf field where I was recruited to play softball.  Thank You.

Photo by Molly Flaherty