Dear Senior Class of 2022,
This is it. This is our last year of high school. Congrats! We made it! We’re graduating soon! Do you remember your first-ever day of high school? I do. I remember being a freshman as if it were yesterday. I felt small. I felt scared. I was excited.
Three years later, here I am. Here we are. Filled to the brim with information about US History, Algebra, and Biology that we probably won’t use at all in our life. The most upper of the upperclassmen. The people on top. The big scary seniors. If I’m going to be honest, sometimes I still feel like a freshman with no idea what I’m doing and no idea what I’m going to do. But even with “a chapter of our life closing” this year, our last year of high school should be the best. Because that is what it’s supposed to be (or at least that’s what everyone tells me).
I think that our class held the most hope. Hope that by the time that it was our turn to graduate, COVID would have cooled down. We got a little taste of what high school was actually like. And it was not at all like High School Musical, (all lies, blasphemous lies) but still fun nonetheless. Now COVID case numbers are either plateauing or steadily rising and it seems as though we will not have the “normal year” that we wanted. Even though the last two years were horribly depressing and every single person on this planet lost somebody, there can still be some semblance of hope for this year, but only if we create it for ourselves.
This is the time to be happy and embrace what opportunities we still have. You might be starting virtually this year. Great, you get to sleep in! And get shorter class periods. Brick and mortar? Time management is probably just a little bit easier, and you actually get to interact with people physically (crazy right?). Do whatever it takes to keep others and yourself safe, remember it’s not about what is convenient but what is safe. Look for the good and compromise where you can.
Bottom line: We are so close to the finish line. A total of 13 years of school, then off to college for another four! (Or into the workforce or a gap year or whatever you have decided to do) Be proud of yourself. The only thing that we have to do now is survive our senior year.
How hard can that be?