The real world of high school
Adam Wallin
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By Adam Wallin
Special to the Arizona Daily Star
At my age, everyone thinks he has a lot to say.
Some people are compelling and lively, while others are trying to blend in. Some experiences will change our lives, while others are just plain ugly. But we are all convinced of the revelation on our tongues, because we live somewhere between adolescent self-importance and full-blown maturity.
We are not too young to write our memoirs. Things in our world are always supposed to be interesting.
Life can seem flat, weary, stale and unprofitable, even when it really isn't. Most of us already know about jobs. Everyone knows about responsibility in some form. In some cases, school has already stopped being the center of the world.
Is it frightening to think about graduation? It depends. The real world isn't frightening as long as you think you're well-adjusted, which we usually think we are.
It's too easy to pigeonhole the high school perception of the future as somehow universally "frightened." Does it give us pause? Yeah. It's pretty safe where we're at, for one thing, although that isn't true for everyone at my age.
As you read this, a poor kid who could have been me is getting arrested in Boston for selling the same drugs some of us use with impunity. Another is failing out of the last public project that would accept him. But a third is writing something exactly like this - something we'll never read - explaining to the thousands of adults in St. Louis reading the Super Seniors insert what it's like to be leaving high school forever. And a fourth has just been given a full scholarship to the music school he's been hoping to go to since he started studying 10 years ago.
Happiness and satisfaction exist in equal measure with heartbreak and disappointment, just like the "real world" that we're supposedly not a part of yet.
We have already mostly been formed, but we have our lives ahead of us, lives that won't ever include high school again once we graduate in a few months. No more engrossing group projects. No more first-name basis with teacher friends. It's on to professors and teaching assistants, impersonal arbiters of our future.
Or no college at all. Some will become professional chefs and some will get bad, dead-end jobs that don't require special skills, and a few of us will end up unemployed.
But most of us will go on to fulfill ourselves in some measure, and probably get married and enjoy our families. We'll be able to love life as much as we ever could, in different ways.
Occasionally, we'll still have strange, teen-age thoughts: "I wonder how many planets have beautiful sunsets?" or "Am I artistic?" or "Would it be too forward if I called him?"
But like everyone who came before, we'll become part of the modern world. Our passions will likely mellow and our interests will certainly change, but we'll be who we always were. We will have graduated and gone on to try to make the most of ourselves.
Adam Wallin is a senior at University High School.
