Different Experiences

Greetings Oak Hill High School. I am Mykayla Greenleaf and I would like to take a minute to say a deep thank you to the teachers, parents, classmates, school itself and of course the multiple hours of Membean that’s been done to get me and this class to where we are today. I remember when this class had to sit through our eighth grade graduation and we were told by so many teachers and parents that the next four years would fly by, man were they right! However highschool for me was bittersweet, I did not have the best experience. From freshman year I knew this was not going to be a good highschool story. By that I mean I had a rough home life, this made normal things teenagers do in highschool impossible for me. Even though I had a rough time at high school I still learned a very important thing to remember in life. Life challenges are supposed to help you discover who you are. 

Freshman year, the grades were great and classes were easy and I thought I was cool for being a highschooler. I always viewed the school as my escape from home, I would spend all my time on grades and I would even stay after to get all of my work done. I was in cheerleading for all three seasons, I was best friends with all of the upper classmen because my brother was one, this made me ten times cooler! My freshman experience was pretty normal compared to all my other classmates, although my homelife was different from everyone else. When I would go home, it was rough. Now I’m not going to give specific details, but I will say I always was trying to find a way to make my time at home very short, staying in sports and hanging out with teachers after school. 

Sophomore year is when I started to venture out more, my parents are divorced, they have been since I was little. I was living with my dad and sophomore year was when I started to go to my mom’s house more. This gave me a break from the rough situation at home. With that I was able to start to try to discover myself, what I like and did not like what I actually wanted to do for sports and what I did not. I started to lose friends a bit towards the end of the year because it was getting a bit more rough at home. Over the summer is when something major happened to me; I had lost a loved one, this took a toll on me mentally. After that I got hit with another major life challenge and finally moved out of my dad’s. 

Starting junior year was real rough for me, I had to battle a lot at home and with myself. My teachers started to notice, this is when I started to get help from my mom and the school to find myself again and start to look over this drought I was stuck in. Junior year was not what I was expecting. Most of my classmates were going to prom, football games, dances, and indulging in all the fun winter carnivals and spring flings throughout the year while I was dealing with life’s challenges. 

Going into senior year, I was looking forward towards all of the joys of being a senior, my homelife was finally amazing and this is when I was going to shine again. I was taking college classes and finally meeting new people to become friends with. As a class we were looking forward to prom, spring fling, senior assemblies, class trip, class night and the big one graduation! This is when the pandemic hit and we were all devastated, we had to switch to online school which made the typical senior experience gone. Prom was canceled and so was class trip, class night, assemblies and we had to do online spring fling. Our graduation strayed from the typical graduation where you can hug and be surrounded with all of your friends and family with no restrictions. This high school experience was not a good one for me to have, highschool was not my fondest memory. However Senior year I had to look for colleges and plan out my future, this what my favorite thing! I applied to all of the colleges I wanted and got accepted into all of them with scholarships as well! I chose my college, I became the first incoming freshman to do the smart start orientation, I made a lot of friends at college already. Although high school was rough for me my future will be bright and stronger. I learned a saying throughout highschool that helped me through the rough parts and that is: no matter how hard it is, or how hard it gets, I’m going to make it. This is a saying that I hope to always live by. 

To summarize, high school is very different for everyone. Some people have the most wonderful experience and some wish that they could hurry up and graduate and never look back. Sometimes people have it rough and some not as much as others, but what we learned from these experiences is what shapes us into who we become and can help us find and discover who we are. It’s not about how many times life knocks down it’s about how we get ourselves back up and look ahead to create the future brighter. I would like to take a moment and thank the teachers, parents, classmates and the school for getting us to where we are now. Congratulations class of twenty-twenty, we did it!

Photo on Foter.com