If you know me, you know that for the last year of high school I thought of nothing but when I would get to leave. I counted down the days to graduation like my life depended on it, which in a way it did, because I don’t think I ever would have made it through that last year if I hadn’t been able to see an end in sight.
I couldn’t wait for the day when I would get to walk down those hallways for the last time and never look back. I couldn’t wait to leave behind all the people who made me feel small and insignificant for four years. I couldn’t wait to start a new life and become a new person at a university whose student population was twice the size of my entire town.
But then all of those dreams quickly became a reality, and it was not at all what I expected it to be.
I found it incredibly difficult to make new friends at university, which in turn affected my mental health and how well I did in school. It seemed to be so easy for everyone else, while I cried on the phone to my mom every day. In these darkest, saddest days of my life, among many other thoughts, there was one that kept me fixated: I wish I could go back to high school.
I wish I could go back to my high school friends who I had known, and who had known me, since elementary school. Even though we drifted apart throughout high school, especially near the end, when I realized many of them were not people I wanted to be associated with, they knew everything about me. I never had to introduce myself a thousand different times or try to connect with a thousand different people like I did during those first months at university. I never had to worry about who I would sit with at lunch or in class because I had been sitting with the same people for the last four years. I had never had to feel as completely invisible as I did during those first few months of university.
I wish I could go back to my high school teachers who knew me by name, the people who were not only my educators but my friends. I miss walking into classes and talking to my teachers about my weekend plans or what I did the night before. I miss sitting in classes of twenty or thirty and having discussions about the course material that could veer off into irrelevant, while still illuminating, rants. While I had intended on introducing myself to all of my professors on the first day of university classes, like everyone says to do, once I walked into my classes of two to eight hundred students, it seemed a lot more daunting to walk up to a professor and start a conversation.
I wish I could go back to my high school classes where I didn’t even really need to show up to do well, but went anyway because I loved what we were learning. I miss being able to get extremely good grades without needing to study very much. I miss writing my essays the night before they were due and still getting a better grade than students who had been working on it for weeks. While I expected my grades to drop in my first semester at university, it still came as a shock to see low 70s and 80s on my papers and tests that would have normally been high 90s in high school.
I wish I could go back and make myself realize how easy I had it in high school. If I thought I had a hard time in high school, I had no idea what was in store for me at university. Even though my problems at the time had seemed like the end of the world, I had no idea how insignificant they would feel a year later. I wish my biggest stress now was having two tests and an essay due in the same week. I wish who had hooked up with who at the party last weekend was the biggest scandal I’d heard. I wish I could tell myself to stop wishing away my high school years, to stop wanting to grow up so fast, and to stop craving new people in my life.
I realize that I can’t go back, and thinking about it, I don’t really want to – even though it’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, I know that university has made me a stronger, more grateful person. While I don’t know what the next four years have in store for me, I know that I had to leave the high school bubble at some point, and whatever comes next will only be for the better.
I just wish I hadn’t wasted so much of my time in high school complaining about stupid things and waiting to leave. I wish I had cherished my friends and appreciated what my teachers were trying to show me. I wish someone had told me – and made me believe – how different things were going to be after high school, so I could have appreciated all my high school moments instead of wishing them away.