All things considered, high school has been a pretty average experience for me. Each factor that has made it “special” to me in turn made it more mediocre when compared to the stories of millions of high schoolers over the years. Making friends, finding passions, riding a roller coaster of emotions, being on the academic grind, all of these things have defined my time in high school, and that’s precisely why this time will not stand out. When I started as a freshman, I was unsure of what I was supposed to take away from my time in high school by the time of graduation. Now that I’m here, I’m still asking that same question.

It’s difficult to put into words what I think of and what I see when reflecting upon the past four years of my life. I feel no flurry of emotions, yet I also can’t say that this was simply a phase which will be forgotten in due time. There’s no one thing that I can say was the defining moment of this time, and I know that at some point, I will move on, in one way or another, from everyone and everything I’ve known in this place. For me, high school has meant so much and absolutely nothing at the same time. I cannot look upon my time here with outright hatred nor fondness, but perhaps that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Yet, it doesn’t feel right to think of the entirety of my time in high school as just “mid,” no matter how much the voice in the back of my head tries to convince me that it was. Reflecting upon an era of your life shouldn’t be as simple as assigning a number out of 100 to each moment and taking the mean score of it all.

When thinking about the positive experiences of high school, I can point to how my outlook on the world was widened and how different cultures I was introduced to redefined my interests. Never did I think that being in a school that on paper is dominated by one demographic would have as much diversity as I found. My friends were also a high point of my time here, being people whom I could spew random nonsense with, spend endless hours playing video games with, and, generally, a great way for me to get out of my comfort zone.

Nevertheless, it would be foolish of me not to address the negatives. As someone who has always been fairly introverted and became even more so coming out of quarantine (despite others’ experiences, the year and a half spent inside without ever having to see the outside world was some of the best fun I’ve had), being in a school environment that actively pushes its students to be sociable with others made me feel at times like I was doing something wrong by not being as open to socializing as others. It’s also hard to ignore how the emphasis on having a strong competitive drive, while definitely beneficial in motivating to keep up with my classmates, also caused me to regularly feel upset at myself for not performing at the “Arcadia standard” at all times.

So ultimately, what was high school to me? Was it four years of gaslighting myself into believing that the good times weren’t really that good and the bad moments weren’t really that bad? Or was it just another part of the “bittersweet symphony that’s life,” as Richard Ashcroft would put it? These are questions that I don’t have a solid answer to, but if nothing else, high school has taught me that sometimes, living in the moment is more important than thinking about it.