To the Freshman, From the Seniors
High school has been compared to many things — prison, hell, the best, and the worst four years of your life. They tell you that the girls are vicious and the guys will use you. You won’t keep friends. You’ll get your heart broken. You’ll hate it. But what they don’t tell you is that you’ll get through it. The time will fly by. You’ll be making amazing friends. You don’t have to be the “popular kid.” You’ll come out stronger than before. So right now, I want you to get every assumption about high school out of your head, because it probably isn’t right.
Don’t let your expectations of high school hold you back from anything. Make new friends, be loud, be the ‘smart jock,’ get out of your comfort zone. You’re not the stupid freshman everyone will say you are. There is so much more to all of you than that ridiculous title, so prove it wrong.
There was a point in my life where I was in the same situation that you were. I was sitting in my homeroom wondering what my next steps in life would be. High school is your next step, enjoy it while it lasts. I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it was three years ago, sadly. Everything was an adventure. Little did I know that those years would become the most carefree and enjoyable times of school I would ever have. All of this is trying to tell you one thing: Enjoy high school while you still can. It will get a lot harder as you grow and even though it still may become enjoyable, your responsibilities are going to become larger. Before you know it, you will be where I am now, wishing that you could go back to the days that were easy. All of your life, you have been told to share, to be nice, to be humble and certainly never to brag. That basically encompasses elementary school and at least most of middle school where everyone is everyone’s friend and the Golden Rule is actively enforced. Well, I will tell you this is not really the case anymore. Not for you at least, not in high school. You’re a big kid now. What I am telling you is that it is alright to not be everyone’s friend. Not everyone is as good as you and it is okay to be proud of that. At the same time, you are not always going to be as good as other people, and that’s okay too.
High school is a time of learning — four long years of it, which, I’ll tell you, feels more like four days when you come down to it. You will be challenged no matter what, but that’s just part of the game. There is no instruction manual. It is your job to figure the game out because it’s just one of many.
You’ve got the pieces to make it work at your fingertips, and by the time this whole mess of guidance counselors and test-prep is over, they will all have fallen into place. Well, mostly. There will be some fundamentals floating about just over your head, but it’ll be fine. Just keep telling yourself that. It will be fine. Aside from all this excitement, part of you might be the smallest bit disappointed. You were at the top of the barrel just last year, not six-months before. The big eighth-grader — the envy of all seventh graders everywhere. You’re at the bottom again and are reminded of what it’s like to look up to someone and not be looked up to yourself.
Us Seniors are all the rage now. The ones who seem to have their lives together, have good grades and manage to have fun all at the same time. We are “gods” with all our game pieces at the finish line while you’ve just set yours at the start. You will be us someday. Someday being a very specific date four years from now when yes, you guessed it. You’ll be at the finish line too. I’ll give you a spoiler now though. You’ll probably feel very far from godlike until you finally walk out the door for the last time. You’ll probably feel very overwhelmed with the prospect of having to get your life together and realizing you have no idea what you’re doing. You’ll have gotten very comfortable in the swing of things and will be nervous about what the next year holds. Nervous and excited. Stereotypical what comes next symptoms. But for now, you have four days — I mean years, to figure all that out.