The Romanization of the Teen Years

I'm sure I'm not the first teenager to have expected high school to be different. To be fair I missed a lot of the experiences due to the events of 2020 and finishing out school with online PSEO. However, I had it somewhere in my mind that high school was exactly like Hollywood or Instagram. If you haven't figured it out yet that's not how it works.

I saw moving to the next level of education as prestige (relatively) and freedom. I thought it was driving, first jobs, intellectual classes, and hanging out with friends at some picture-perfect party. In a way, it is all those things but my assumptions also couldn't be farthest from reality.

Dear younger me, here's the truth about what the next four years have in store for you.

High school does include driving but it's panicking because you don't know how to merge onto the freeway and you're not ready to pilot a metric ton of metal at fifty miles per hour. It's taking the most stressful test of your life. It's standing in line at the DMV. It's having a government-imposed curfew for six months.

High school is first jobs but it's cleaning the bathroom because none of your coworkers will do it. It's cleaning, whatever you think your job is, half of it is cleaning. It's dealing with customers asking you to do things that can't be done. It's receiving a paycheck of fifty dollars because your hours got cut.

High school is intellectual classes but it's stressing out over AP tests. It's crying over calculus homework because "what even is an integral?" It's trying to maintain straight A's with teachers who think a C is average. It's cursing Shakespeare, Darwin, Newton, and Columbus all on the same day. It's skipping things to do homework. It's staying up late only to wake up at 5 a.m. the next day to do it all again.

High school is hanging out with friends, but it's not picture-perfect. It's not sitting on a graffitied wall watching the world pass by. It's playing spicy UNO and arguing about the rules. It's bonfires and overbearing moms. It's drawing dragons on the library whiteboard. It's calling your friends a bad influence when you know they're not. In the moment it's not picture perfect, but the memories are.

I've learned in hindsight that anything can be romanticized.

The most, straight-out-of-a-high-school-coming-of-age-movie moment I ever experienced was sitting in the back of a friend's car. It was cold out, a little bit rainy. There were about eight of us crammed into this minivan. We listened to Olivia Rodrigo. We were a bunch of teenagers sitting in a church parking lot past dark. It was something straight out of a movie. You'll have a lot of experiences like that.

You'll hate Romeo and Juliet with a burning passion but "banished!" will become a lasting joke. You haven't gotten a job yet, but when you do you'll go through times where you love it, hate it, and everything in between. You'll find that doing dishes isn't all that bad. You'll be terrified of driving but you'll get your license on your first try. You'll tell the story of getting lost during your driving test when the opportunity arises. You'll finally have a friend group you stick with for more than a year. They'll be a good group for you.

You'll learn a lot about the world and about yourself. You're not going to feel grown up though, not even after your 18th birthday. You'll only feel like you've matured in hindsight. You'll look back at all the things that don't scare you anymore and remember that it's been four years. At somepoint it may strike you that you've grown up. You'll change a lot, and you'll stay remarkably the same. There is never a day where you wake up a different person. You slowly become a new person over time. It's scary to imagine changing who you are, but it will be for the better.

You don't know it yet but, you're living in a coming-of-age movie. Remember to romanticize your high school life a bit, I know I didn't nearly enough. It will be rough for a while but in the end, I promise it gets better. On the day of your graduation ceremony, you'll look at your cords and your friends and think "this was what it was about all along". You'll smile and you'll try not to cry and you'll do your best to lock that moment in your memory forever.

Sincerely,

Future you