Dear future Alex, have you been taking time to make memories?
Recently, on a TikTok, I saw someone mention that your high school years are the last time in your life when you have immediate access to your friends and family. Sure, I have some friends who live in different parts of the country, or have graduated and gone to college, but 90% of my closest friends live within a few miles of me. I see my parents every day, my sister comes home from college every few months, and I regularly visit my extended family. Until I saw that clip, it never dawned on me how temporary it was having all of my loved ones close to me, and it started to reframe how I want to experience the next two years before I go to college.
I pride myself on being an active student; I’m involved in several clubs, and I take mostly APs and honors classes. I try to dedicate myself to as much as I can, simply because I want to be the best that I can be. With that said, I don’t want my classes or clubs to define me as a person. Recently, though, I’ve found that I focus almost all of my energy on school and clubs, and I quickly get burnt out from focusing more on everything that I have to complete, rather than enjoying the things that I am actually doing. I think it’s essential to try hard in school and activities, but there is a delicate needle to thread between working hard and overexerting yourself. I hope to thread that needle by taking time away from school and activities to spend time with friends, go outside, and, it’s cliché, but make memories.
We never get to relive moments in our lives. I think I find myself only appreciating how incredible something is until it’s over. When my sister moved to college, I went to sleep that night and didn’t hear her next door. I woke up, and the bathroom was quiet. I noticed an empty chair at the dinner table. And then I realized how separate I was from her. It used to be that I would say goodbye to her if she left school before me, and now I say goodbye at the airport. I really wish I appreciated how special it was to have my sister around that much before she left, but unfortunately, I can’t go back and relive those years.
Instead, I just want to appreciate each additional special moment I have in high school before I ultimately go to college. I know college will be fun, and going there will not be the only big change I face in life, but what makes it so scary is that moving to college is also the time when you stop being a kid. Everyone older always tells you to enjoy your youth and appreciate being a kid, and they look back at their childhood, recalling so many fond memories. Now that I realize how little time I have left as a kid, I want to make sure that I spend the rest of that time creating those moments that I will look back on.
So dear future Alex, whether you are reading this a week after writing or more than ten years later, I hope that you can look back on that time and feel like you spent more of it enjoying your high school years, rather than being consumed by schoolwork. Obviously, over the next two years, I hope to have worked hard, and gotten good grades, but I know that 20 years from now, the feelings I will want to remember from that time are joy and excitement, not stress and worry.
