Isabella Leverone

My feelings about graduation are mixed.

Graduating is something that we’ve always talked about since the first year of school. Even in kindergarten, we graduated to 1st grade. Everyone has been prepared to graduate our whole lives. Now that I’m four months away, I’ve never felt so unprepared for anything in my life.

I’m so excited to get out of school and never come back, but at the same time, I’m terrified. What will I do after high school? I won’t have my morning routine that I’ve had for the past 13 years. I won’t wake up at 6:00 a.m. to then drag myself out of bed for a six-hour school day. I will never see the people that I’ve seen my whole life. I will never put a spoon under my pillow, wishing for a snow day. I will never count down the days to the weekend.

Something that is really weird for me is the fact that the people that I’ve seen every day for 13 years are going to be strangers that I occasionally see at the grocery store or the mall. I’m going to make eye contact and smile, but nothing more than that. It will be like I’ve never known these people. We will soon become invisible to each other.

I’ve never thought it would feel this weird to be graduating, but here I am, four months away from graduating, and it’s all starting to feel so real. I feel like just yesterday I was a terrified freshman. Then, I thought that the four years would go by so slow, but in the  blink of an eye, I’m a senior, about to graduate. Everything feels so surreal. I never thought that this part of my life would come so fast. It feels so weird to even be thinking about how I’m going to keep in touch with my friends, teachers, and people who helped me most. I need to figure out what I’m going to do for work and how I’m going to live on my own.

Being graduated seems like freedom, but nobody really talks about what it’s like to wake up in August and you no longer have to go to your first day of school. How it feels not registering for classes and figuring out which electives you want more than the others. How it feels to not have to make a list of the homework you have for that night. Nobody talks about what it’s like, walking the stage, shaking everyone’s hands, and transitioning into the next chapter of life. My whole high school career, college has seemed like the only option for after high school, but now that I’m close to graduating, college isn’t an option for me anymore. I want to go into the workforce and learn what I’m passionate about. I don’t want to rush myself into anything.

Everything is coming to an end. 13 years of school is about to end, and everyday that I’ve complained about school isn’t going to matter. Anything that happened in school will suddenly not matter ever again. My school email will never be used for random websites that I used for one class, and I will never have to use my lunch number again.