Walking into Jacksonville High School on the first day of my senior year was much different than walking into school on the first day of my freshman year. Ever since my first day of high school, people were constantly telling me how fast it was going to go and how much I was going to love it. They weren’t wrong about either, although it’s definitely hard to love high school sometimes. But the thing I heard only on the first day of my senior year was that it was our “last first day of school.”
Soon enough we’re going to be attending our last football game and homecoming week. It’ll be senior night for the tennis team and instead of making posters for the senior girls, the underclassmen will be making them for us. Our days here are numbered and before we know it, our favorite teachers won’t be a classroom away, and there will be no real-life freshmen to mess with.
Senior Hannah Scobbie commented on how “weird” it is that we’re seniors, and how it doesn’t feel like we’re old enough to be in our last year of high school.
It’s too easy to focus on the ending of everything we’ve known for the past four years, too easy to think of the people you’ll never see again and too easy to be afraid of walking across that stage. It’s scary, but high school is only temporary and that’s hard to remember when you’re here for so long. It’s difficult to picture a day when I’ll wake up and go to work instead of school or a day when I’ll wake up and have to make breakfast for my family. It’s hard to imagine which direction my life is going, and I can’t help but think it’d be so much easier if I had someone coaching me through it. But life is full of scary things that you have to do on your own in order to grow, and the faster you accept it, the easier it’ll be. The feeling is easily compared to being thrown off a cliff without any warning. But instead of focusing on what is going to happen when you finally get to the bottom, you have to appreciate the fall.