Yesterday was the ten-year anniversary of my graduation from high school (thank you Nicole for pointing this out….I didn’t actually remember the date myself and I am far too lazy to get into my storage stuff and find my graduation announcements to confirm the date). Ten years ago I donned my cap and gown and accepted my high school diploma, ready to take the first step into adulthood.
Well, to be exact, ten years ago this morning I arrived home from Grad Night at Disneyland and settled into my nice soft bed just in time to be roused by a phone call from my brother, who’d locked the keys in his car in the parking lot of Albertson’s. Ah yes, I do remember that. But anyway….
A silly photo of my siblings and I, Graduation 2002
By graduation day, I was ready to be done with high school and looking forward to a summer of working followed by my first semester at college. Although I was a bit sentimental, for the most part I was ready to move on.
A part of me looks back ten years and is a bit sad that life will never again be as simple as it was back then. But, well, that’s life. You make choices, you choose a path and hopefully head down it with confidence. The only thing that stays the same is that everything changes. I have a lot of fond memories, and more than a few lousy ones, that have formed over the years between seventeen and twenty-seven. I regret a few things, but not too many, because even the stuff that sucked made me who I am today, and I’m happy with my life now.And anyway, it’s easy to romanticize the past, but the truth is that I wasn’t overly thrilled about being a teenager and longed for the freedom of adulthood. Now I have the freedom, and despite the stress and responsibilities that come with it, I have to say that I like it.
One of my favorite shows in high school was MTV’s “Daria”. I wasn’t the social outcast that she is, but I didn’t really belong to any one group of friends and sort of just hung out with a mix of kids I’d known since elementary school and people I met through the years. In her speech at her high school graduation, Daria says, “So let me just say that, in my experience, high school sucks. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have started advanced placement classes in preschool so I could go from eighth grade straight to college. ” I wouldn’t go as far as to say that high school sucked (although parts of it really did), but let’s be honest – it wasn’t the best time in my life, either.
So this wasn’t the typical sentimental, what-I’ve-learned-since-high-school blog, but oh well. Who wants to read that fluff anyway?