Farewell Oak Hill High School

To my fellow English 4 classmates sitting in this room, I know that you have already heard tons of speeches but today I am going to talk about my experience of school including middle and high school.  There are 3 things that I have learned and I want to share them with you. 1.) You will most likely get bullied and picked on. 2.) Procrastination is going to be your worst enemy…senioritis. & 3.) The friends that you have now, will probably not be the ones that you end with.

I know that most of you don’t want to hear about my school experiences but it’s a requirement, so here we go.  I know for me, school started out as a place where I felt safe and actually had fun with my friends but, as time went by things happened that made me not want to show my face in this district anymore.  Let’s start In middle school. I was always getting picked on but when 6th grade came around, the bullying got worse. I got bullied because of my size, the way I liked to present myself with my clothes and hair and worst of all, I got bullied for being confident in myself and the way I was but soon enough I started listening to them and my self-esteem slowly went away and didn’t really get it back until my sophomore year of high school.  I would always wear tank tops or a spaghetti strap under my shirts to try and “suck” in my tummy, I wouldn’t wear shorts because I was told my thighs were big and shouldn’t be shown. Somedays, I would even wear sweatshirts all day(even on the warmer/summer days) just because I didn’t want to be called “fat”. When I look back at this time of my life, I just wish I had never tried to hide who I am and that I know what I know now, Being yourself is the best thing you could do, even if other people don’t like it.

Now let’s jump into the high school years.  I started out as a good student, getting my work done and getting help when I needed it but, eventually my drive for getting work done just vanished.  I have no clue why it did but I just happened to procrastinate more and more which lead to me failing 2cd semester of english 3 and having to make it up.  Now that it’s the end of senior year, I definitly feel the senioritis kicking in (even though it was there before) and before it knew it, we were at May with only 4 weeks left and I still had a lot of work to do.  Then it came to only having two weeks left while still having a lot of work due and now we are here the last week of school. Over the past 4 years, I have learned that in order get things done on time while procrastinating, is to put procrastination into your schedule so that you know it will get done.  

Now, when I entered high school, I had big group of friends that I thought I would end up graduating with but halfway through my sophomore year a lot of shit happened and that big friend group that I had since like forever had broken apart for reasons that I’m not going to say but good things did happen because of it.  I ended up finding out who my real friends are and decided to get closer with them. They are the 2 of the reasons that I got my confidence back. They helped me to see that it doesn’t what anyone else thinks about me, it only matters what I think of myself. I now live by the quote, “I used to walk into a room full of people and wonder if they like me…now I look around and wonder if I like them.”  I am glad to say that the friends I have now, I know that I can go to any one of them if I have a problem and that we will be in each other’s lives for a long time.

Photo by bytekut on Foter.com / CC BY