Expect the Unexpected

Dear class of 2020 and Oak Hill staff, I am honored today to share this speech with you. We started this year off strong, as with all four years, most of us were looking forward to graduating, while some of us were hoping for more schooling, because let’s face it the real world is scary and sucks sometimes…well most of the time.

I am worried about paying all my bills off on time, I will have to learn more about this. I am also stressed about finding the right job for me, being able to earn enough money on my own. We all go through tough times, figuring out what we want to do, paying bills, going off on your own, it can be hard and sucky for the most parts.

There are upsides like finding the right job, getting good credit, and having more freedom. I hope to find the right job soon enough, and whether or not I have to go to college to find what I want to do, or just join the workforce to figure it out I will have to do it. I am hoping to learn all the adult things such as taxes, bills, loans, and the whole college system after I leave Oak Hill High School, that way I can be prepared to “go off on my own”. 

When we came up as freshmen we were told by the upperclassmen that we needed to get our work done, and to not procrastinate to survive high school and boy were they right.  High school has been pretty stressful to say the least to probably most of us, and we wish to finish this year off strong, though this year ended differently than all of us were expecting it to. This year will go down in history as one of the worst starts to a year, to a year that we were all looking forward to. The year 2020 when the Coronavirus hits, closes down schools, public gatherings, restaurants, stores, this list goes on. The last thing we were probably expecting is “Are we going to run out of toilet paper and soap?”

However this coronavirus leaves nearly everyone asking this question all over the world. 2020, the year where the economy has taken a huge hit, and people lost their jobs. This year so far has been almost as bad as school food. Needless to say 2020 is not off to a good start, though there are some upsides, summer is coming up, and will be our last time “off” until most if not all of us go to college or get a full time job, or both. This year is a great example of “expect the unexpected” because no one was probably expecting a huge pandemic to disturb all gatherings, schools, restaurants. In a way this pandemic seemed great not for the case of people getting sick, or even dying, but a chance to get out of school… seems great only for about the second day, then it gets boring… really boring. I came to the realization that I am not a fan of school, but after a few days in quarantine I was wishing I was still in school. This is a great example of “don’t take things for granted” because you don’t know how good you have something till it’s gone, and even though I didn’t like school all that much as most people I guarantee most of those same people were wishing they were back in school.

This will be a great year to look back on when your kids say they are “bored” after one day of nothing, you can say to them “back in my day we had a pandemic called the Coronavirus, we had nothing to do for at least 2 months” it will be a great thing to look back on in hopes that nothing like it will hopefully not happen in the future. 

In the future I will not take things for granted, like simple items such as toilet paper and soap. I will also try to expect the unexpected because some things are out of my control. I want to say thank you to all of the Oak Hill staff for making my year great, and I hope everyone has a great rest of the year, and hopefully a bright future ahead of them. 

Photo by Thomas Hawk on Foter.com / CC BY-NC