Senior year of high school is the year of lasts: your last first day, your last homecoming, your last Friday night football game, your last prom, your last goodbye. It’s the time of packing up your life, nicely and with a bow, to unwrap it again in August, miles away from home and the known world. It’s a year I’ve been dreaming about since I saw my older sister walking down the aisle at graduation. It’s a culmination of my life and education—and boy, is it nerve-wracking.
A necessary demon of senior year is the dauntless task of planning the future. We still have to ask to go to the bathroom, but we also have to find ourselves enough to be able to decide what we want our next years to look like. We spent the last year cramming for SATs, ACTs, Subject Tests. We run around like headless chickens, trying to wrangle teacher recommendations and fee waivers. We ask anyone and everyone to read our personal statements. We devote our vacations to college applications, feeling like we’re at our breaking point until the moment we hit “submit.” Then we look back at our applications and groan when we see mistakes we fear could cost us our future.
And so before we know it, we’re halfway to June. We were so involved in planning, we forgot to relish the present. We promise ourselves that now that application season is over, we will dedicate ourselves to enjoying the rest of senior year. We come back to school fresh-faced and well rested, and then the future strikes again.
We look at each other, thinking both, “Oh crap,” and “This is my competition.” Yup, you guessed it, it’s scholarship season. We scramble around trying to get W-2s, both our own and those of our parents. We fill out the FAFSA and send it off to our colleges, a bundle of anxiety as we run around trying to figure out how to pay for school without even knowing where we’ll be going. We try to plan out a future that is not yet set. For months we sit around, making visits to our mailing address, crossing our fingers and hoping we see a congratulatory letter.
I have a routine. I wake up, shower, get changed, eat breakfast, run to the bus stop, then take the 60-minute bus ride to school, where I check my email every 30 minutes, just to be safe. After school I go to work, and I check my email there, too. After work, I drop by the post office, looking for letters. I get home, check my email, my student portals, scholarships, my FAFSA status and College Scholarship Service profile. I do homework and then go to bed, coiled up in anxiety and nerves. After eight hours of sleep at best, I start all over again.
All people, but especially teenagers, like to complain: about the time, food, the weather, everything. Yet high school seniors have their plates full with school, college applications, scholarships, internships, part-time jobs, extracurricular clubs, sports and a social life. It is the hardest year we have lived, and seniors do reach their individual breaking points. We are caught in a limbo between childhood and adulthood, between unaccountability and responsibility, between enjoying our lasts and worrying over what is to come. It truly is the worst of times and the best of times.
Adrian Vega, a senior at Tomales High, plans to attend college in the fall, but he has yet to decide a school. He serves as the Light’s student intern as part of his senior project.