In elementary school, I couldn’t wait for recess to run around the “blacktop” and hang off the monkey bars. In 9th grade, one of my favorite periods was gym because, at the end of the semester, I got to help make up an original dance routine.

Now a senior, my biggest school-related thrill is going home.

What’s changed? Maybe it’s the allure of college freedom that makes these last few weeks of high school seem far less appealing than it was my freshman year. But my inability to immerse myself in the high school experience isn’t necessarily new.

Though I still “wish I had spent more time enjoying freshman year,” graduation cannot come fast enough. Students are constantly corrupted into believing that high school is a tumultuous yet magnificent time that is filled with all these fantastically imaginative moments. As senior year is coming to an end, I have finally come to realize that the “high school experience” doesn’t really exist.

During this four-year “journey”, students are expected to build all these intense relationships and develop into these evolved individuals with all these unique experiences. While students are going to change as they grow older, it’s rarely to the extent commonly projected.

Yes, I’ve made multiple friends and have significantly grown since my freshman year, but is that because of high school or because I’m not 14 years old anymore? High school has definitely been a transitional part of my life, much like middle school was and college will be.

As an adolescent, I have been expanding my horizons and continually developing in the hopes of someday becoming a successful, well-adjusted woman in a progressive society. Is my “journey” that much different from anybody else’s though?

Students should take the opportunities available in high school to try new things, but that is good advice for any situation. Having fun and enjoying life should be a goal at every stage of life, not just adolescence and, certainly, not just in high school.

High school is not the only time to experience things in your life, most people would leave high school as average and unextraordinary as ever if it was held up to its perceived reputation.

If chilling at home in pjs with popcorn is how you like to spend the weekend, then do that. If you want to be a star athlete, then keep practicing. If you want to be the president of a different club every year, then put yourself out there. However, if you don’t really care about school and only come so that you can go to the three dances we have each year, then maybe you need to sort out your priorities.

Spend these four years in high school doing whatever you think is interesting enough, knowing that you’ll have four more years after that to pick a career and fifty years after that to live your life, hopefully doing whatever makes you happy.

The best moments of high school for me were sitting, surrounded by friends, just talking. The most stressful times, besides trying to excel in academics, was trying to make memorable moments happen and ending up frustrated because my expectations just weren’t becoming reality.