Leave {High School} Alone. It’s Fine.

We have just about concluded high school graduation season, and the people doing the actual graduating are about to hear a lot of mixed messages about how to rank the past four years of their lives. “Don’t be an Uncle Rico,” their older siblings will say, with a reference no one in high school will grasp. “High school sucks. Your life is about to get a lot better.”

But here’s the thing, high school is fine.

Several years ago, on my 29th birthday I told a group of people that I was staggered a little by the fact that it had been 10 years since I had graduated high school. I hadn’t meant it in a wistful, it’s-been-10-years-since-my-life-rocked way, but one person thought I did. He asked why I was longing for those days because “high school was awful, and if those were the best days of your life then something is wrong.” I then explained that I was only using that event as a marker.

Going to college and moving out of your parents’ house is a major shift in people’s lives. It’s when you really start to become an adult. Until that point, the only thing most of us have been responsible for is doing schoolwork and not getting ourselves maimed, killed, or arrested. (I’m not saying that some people don’t HAVE to have jobs or take care of siblings, it’s just not the norm.)

Finishing state-mandated schooling is when the training wheels come off, but, because brain and personality development are settling down, high school memories are still vivid (more so than junior high and elementary), and it doesn’t feel like it has been that long ago. But it had been 10 years. A third of my life.

My point wasn’t even that those were the glory days. It was simply as a demarcation of time.

The end of high school is big shift in most people’s lives. A lot of changes are gradual. That one is very clear. It’s a score mark in life’s bedrock. But he threw his baggage on me.

I thought about this person’s response, his outright rejection of the idea that someone might remember ages 15 to 18 as being pretty great. He was at once disgusted by and dismissive of this notion. He was dismissgustive. Right now, it’s popular to reflect on high school as some Wild West / Lord of the Flies combo with social events. It’s on trend to suggest anyone with a brain knew this and hated it. It is not cool to say “High school was really fun. I had an awesome time.”

Allegedly, some older generation once preached that high school as the best time in a person’s life.

They said this because in olden days, adults were always forced into unfulfilling jobs to support families that didn’t appreciate the drudgery that went into putting food on their plates. And because times have changed, apparently, you’re supposed to nullify any enjoyment of your high school years by the fact that as an adult in 2018, you are out here chasing your dreams and killing it in the real world.

But my parents never hated their lives, never implied that high school was the pinnacle of existence. I never heard it from them, nor did I hear anyone else. So, I’m not sure where this whole farce comes from.

And high school graduates do need to know that creating an adult life can be fun and awesome.

But that doesn’t mean that high school wasn’t also fun and awesome in a different way.

In high school, the place I had to spend my day was filled with people in my age group. When you start a job, there might be weird old people there who don’t know all of the same TV theme songs as you. I spent my ample free time fucking around with friends. Now, getting more than three of my friends together is like pulling teeth. And no one wants to just come chill on my couch, they want to go to some pop-up candy themed cocktail bar.

Adulthood is nice. Having a go-to dish that you make for dinner and is delicious is the shit (mine is shepherd’s pie). But whereas adult life is fulfilling because it is difficult, high school is fulfilling because it’s a breeze (your personal trauma notwithstanding.) They are different.

So this is my backlash to the backlash. High school is fine. You can enjoy it without it being the best.