I’m finally a senior. I’m finally a part of that coveted spot in the social food chain of high school. I get to have my own hallway, go to prom and, all in all, just be really cool. Not that I wasn’t already. But seniordom is not all glitz and sparkles. I discovered that after a fateful day this summer when I had to get my senior portraits taken.

As teenagers, we agonize over having our picture taken. But after this wrenching experience, I have now relinquished this petty tendency. Standing sideways with my hand on my hip, looking just so frickin’ happy, I felt oddly out of place. Oh, I felt so ready for the spotlight, posing with my hands crossed, leaning forward with my head titled ever so slightly. And then there are the ones where I don’t even look at the camera. And another where I’m in full cap and gown, giving an enthusiastic thumbs up and smiling in response to the camera guy exclaiming, “You just GRADUATED!”

And so I ask this question: are all senior portraits this disastrous? Or was it just my uncoordinated fumbling during this particular moment in my life that made me appear so awkward? Do we all freeze when having to pose so unnaturally?

I just went with the flow, embracing all of my apparent personas. There’s the sassy Katie, who puts her hands on her hips and just knows EVERYTHING, okay?! There’s the coy, yet expressive Katie, who lays her head on her hands, as if she is thinking intently about her next scene as Eliza Doolittle. There’s also the insanely psyched Katie, who is just SO excited about graduating. After getting the uncharacteristic prints in the mail, my parents blatantly told me, “We have nothing to send to the relatives.”

After I went through these painfully bizarre sittings, I moved on to the shot that actually mattered — the one everyone would see in the yearbook. The pressure was on. Now, this was no ordinary shot; it required a black velvet chest-covering frock. It was hard enough to get my senior picture right wearing my own clothes – this being the last memory everyone will have of me after I depart on my own way to college – but here was this guy making me put on an uncomfortable black drape, held up only by a clothespin.

I soon realized that none of these poses were really me. None of them captured the Katie I wanted everyone to see. None of them captured how glad I was to be starting my senior year, ready to get the most I could out of high school for one more year. None of them showed the Katie who is eager to explore her possibilities in the next four years, the Katie who only wants to take on fantastic new challenges. But, I guess, you can’t get all of that from a picture, despite how hard you’re forced to look like you can.