Throughout high school, there’s only one thing people look towards since freshman year, and that is graduating. The ultimate milestone to high school, to prove you achieved something for all the years you went to school, is finally getting up on that stage and receiving the diploma. No more staying up late to finish assignments, or walking up and down the same hallway for four years without fail. Waking up early when all you want to do is sleep. It may seem as though graduation has more excitement than anything, but there’s one emotion everyone silently shares, and that is fear.
Fear cannot be defined, as it is found in everything. As the years pass by, the more thought you put into what you have to do after school ends, the more the anxiety builds up. You never really know what’ll happen after you exit those familiar hallways that are filled with routine. Realizing that you won’t have that sort of structure after you leave builds the fear within many teenagers, which they call ‘senioritis’.
Graduation should feel like it’s a finish line, one last race to win before the end of your career, but for many teenagers, it feels as though they are standing on the brow of a hill. Many people feel as though they aren’t ready to leave everything that they’ve built with their academics behind them because they don’t know what they are going to end up doing with this education. For many seniors, school was all they’ve ever known, like clockwork, day in and day out. Again, you continuously return to this same ‘dreaded’ place until you realize it isn’t dreaded as much as you believed it was throughout your life. “I’m nervous to graduate. For a long time, I was excited to get out of here, but I know I’m going to miss it,” senior Kevin Ruggles shared
The expectations of the upcoming young adults are the part that ‘freaks’ most people out. Students often get asked what they are planning to do with the rest of their lives before they understand who they are and what they genuinely want to be condemned to for the rest of their lives. Graduating means leaving the people you’ve known your entire life and moving out to do greater things with different, sometimes better, people, which is a scary concept for a lot of upcoming graduates.
