People often say, “It passes faster than you think”. Four years ago, in Fakler’s fitness class as a spindly freshman felt like a different life. It’s strange: life must be lived forward, but can only be understood in reverse. When I reflect on my life in that classroom, which feels like a decade ago, the person I see is almost entirely different from the person I am now. Walter Johnson was a difficult experience for me. But difficulty spurs growth, and that only makes sense now that I flip through all those difficult memories and emotions: stress, anxiety, euphoria, shame, boredom, placelessness. And honestly, reflecting on all those moments makes me grateful. Grateful for what I have learned, for the struggle, for the challenge, for the experience. Grateful because the bad memories make you just as much of who you are as the good. I think it is difficult to reflect on a given high school ‘experience’. It is easy to quantify the success of high school when considering the results. Many of us, myself included, see WJ as a means to an end: get good grades, take hard classes, and work your way into a good college. What many people don’t understand is that high school is more than a stepping stone to propel oneself headfirst into adulthood. No matter who you are, you leave high school a completely different person than when you came. I realize this now. I wish all who are reading this luck in the years to come. Good or bad, high school changes us all.
