Making The Most of Your HS Experience

I’m sure just reading the title of this article made you feel ten shades of “inadequate”. I know that last year, and every year of high school before that, it would have made me feel that way. When I first began high school, I held the mantra “make friends, make friends, make friends” at the forefront of my brain starting from the very first day. Two and a half years later, that mantra still played on repeat in the recesses of my mind. I know that I am not alone in my experience—one way or another, many of us have experienced an intense type of pressure to fit in. Whether it be through FOMO (AKA, “fear of missing out”), social anxiety, or pressure to perform, we have all felt the need to be someone we’re not at some point or another. This isn’t always a bad thing—after all, high school is the perfect time to discover who you want to be. Yet, more often than not, these skewed expectations lead to a toxic mentality of believing that you’re not good enough. 

Allow me to break it down for you.  

Many of us entered high school with a lot of expectations for the next four years to come: we were going to get stellar grades, of course, but we were also going to go to the coolest parties, have so many amazing friends, and be completely involved in our school community. It didn’t matter that these expectations were based on what we had seen on T.V. and learned in movies; it was totally realistic, and if Serena van der Woodsen could do it, we could do it too. And so, the years long struggle to be someone we weren’t began. You may have done this differently than I did, but I found myself trying my absolute hardest to get other people to like me by pretending to be someone else. This isn’t the only way we change ourselves to fit in, though: some people take courses they don’t want to in order to make their parents proud; some people live in a constant, one-sided competition with others; some people count how many times they go out, and with how many people, to feel more popular. All of this, to make sure we’re getting the “full high school experience.” Eventually, we find ourselves on the other side of the world from the person we used to be, feeling lost, wondering whether or not we’re better off. 

It took me time to figure this out, but I realized that I wasn’t better off. Everything I did felt like ticking off yet another box from the never-ending checklist that, when completed, I thought would finally make me feel like I had done everything I was meant to. I ended each day thinking that I wasn’t enough. Wasn’t enough for whom? Therein lay my issue: I was working not to please myself but others. For me, the solution was spending a lot of time with myself, getting to know the person I had become, and reconciling her with the person I wanted to be. It’s not a perfect process, nor is it complete, but I have finally discovered the key to making the most of my high school experience: doing it truly, and completely, for myself. 

This is the best advice I can give you. I’m not sure how much it’s worth, considering I’m still learning and recovering from my mistakes, but after three years of high school, it’s all the advice I have to give. It doesn’t matter how many times you go to parties, or when you have your first kiss, or how many times you get the highest grade in the class; none of that matters if you’re not doing any of it for yourself.