The moments I remember from high school aren’t the ones I planned for. They aren’t the tests I spent hours studying for or the grades I stressed over at the time. Instead, they’re the small, unstructured moments that turned out to mean the most, like the funny conversations I had with my friends in class when we were supposed to be working, the stress-relieving laughs I shared with my English classmates right before in-class essays, or the carpools to practice where my teammates and I recapped our school days.
None of those moments felt important while they were happening. But they all had one thing in common: they were the moments where I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. No pressure was attached, no grades were involved. I didn’t even realize that they’d matter: at the time, they felt like background parts of the day that I moved through without thinking twice.
What I thought mattered was maintaining perfect grades and perfect attendance. I remember spending hours rewriting a single paragraph or redoing the same practice problems again and again. Looking back, those moments had a smaller impact on shaping my future than I once thought. In the long run, that one low test grade won’t keep you from getting into a good college. Neither is that one presentation where you stuttered a lot, nor that one leadership position that you didn’t get. You will end up exactly where you are meant to end up, and at the end of it all, at the end of all the tears and hours spent staying up, you will still graduate.
At the end of high school, you won’t remember every test score, every assignment, or every late night spent trying to get things perfect. Those things don’t, and shouldn’t, define your high school experience. We spend all these years waiting for Friday, for the next week off from school, and for the summer. But what we fail to appreciate is how unique of an experience high school is. You will never again experience the simultaneous thrill and anxiety that comes with going out with your friends until midnight on a school night. You won’t ever grab McDonald’s with your friends in formalwear after a school dance, or chug caffeine while “studying” with your classmates at Panera after school. When looking back at high school, these are the moments that will stick with you, not the ones you tried to plan and perfect.
The same is true for the experiences that ended up defining my high school years. Almost all of them started as things I didn’t plan on doing or expected to enjoy. Going to France on the exchange trip was a decision I could have easily talked myself out of, but it gave me some of my closest friendships. Joining the swim team meant stepping into something unfamiliar, but it quickly became one of the most meaningful parts of my high school experience. And taking journalism my freshman year, something I chose without fully knowing what to expect, gave me a forever family on the Ghostwriter editorial board.
In the end, my high school experience wasn’t defined by what I tried to control or perfect. It was defined by the ones I didn’t expect to matter at all, the ones that weren’t planned or graded, and those ended up meaning the most to me.
