High school? I have no regrets. I just wish I did everything differently.
Supposedly the four years of our lives where we “find ourselves” and become an “individual” and make our own “decisions” and flower “intellectually,” my years at CHS have debunked the lie that our parents and teachers want us to believe, that I am me.
What’s alarming is that I am not me, and considering the conformity orgy that is CHS, you are probably not you.
If I could sit down with and compare 8th grader Ron Stoppable and 12th grader Ron Stoppable, behind their shared freckly-faced timidity would emerge a very obvious difference.
But whether he actually had the hots for that cute cheerleader-crime fighter is beside the point and completely irrelevant.
Rather, if I could compare who I am now to who I was four years ago, I would come to the realization that my years at CHS were not those of self-discovery and finding unity with my ka, but of melting into the system. I would find that I had in fact become more like CHS than myself; that I had sacrificed much of my identity to comfortably exist here.
Admittedly, I am exaggerating the situation for dramatic effect, imagining a problem where there is none for the sole purpose of pretending that I conquered some obstacle of mythic proportions to impress teachers and quell grandparents’ worries that I learned nothing in high school (love ya gma!). However, there is a grain of truth in this beach of wisdom I now impart on you. And that is exactly what it’s all about, finding that grain of truth among the innumerable grains of sand (that’s why seniors go to beach week after graduation, for truth).
Such were my thoughts when I was waiting in line for my senior football picture to be taken. As each of my friends took his turn smiling in front of the camera in the thick August heat, I realized that I was a grain of sand in a beach of sand; I realized that I was a follower, a conformist, and that I would smile just as they had when it came to be my turn.
Shedding my former skin, I cracked a wry little smirk as the photographer pulled the trigger, and thus inaugurated my departure from the crowd.
From then on I desperately sought ways to prove to myself that I wasn’t a cog in the machine and that I was an individual—a principled individual. I refused to take my senior portrait, still proudly awaiting a gray square in the yearbook where my head should be. Remember that “Anti-Bullying Pledge” we were all forced to sign at the beginning of the school year? Didn’t sign it. Never will. I was the embodiment of Lonely Island’s “Threw it on the Ground” clip, and it felt so good.
Things got trippy when I began to use the whiteboards in my English class to advocate for the reestablishment of serfdom and to rant about the bourgeoisie’s enslavement of the working class. I capped the year off by skydiving and informing the College and Career Center that I would be attending South Potomac Penitentiary next year.
After all this resistance and raging against the machine, after all of my efforts to be different, I have found that I am completely right. The system is worth abandoning, and you would all be wise to abandon it earlier than I did. For such a tolerant and accepting community as CHS, we are stiflingly homogenous. New students too quickly fall in line with the order, and what is meant to be an institution that encourages thought-provoking questions reasserts itself year after year as a breeding ground for cultural taboos that instills in students knee-jerk reflexes to words like “socialism,” “Montgomery College” and “traditional marriage.”
In the summing words of Andy Samburg, “the moral of this story is… you can’t trust a system, man!” The only chance you have at arriving at that grain of truth is by rejecting that which your friends believe and by employing your intellect to explore new ideas. Delve into those history books. Open a brothel. Refuse to cheat. Run barefoot. Pray to God. Be a communist. Do whatever it takes to be absolutely sure that you are you and not a reflection of the society in which you have been raised. Do whatever is necessary to find that grain of truth amid the sand dunes that stretch endlessly around the world.
