High school seniors have a general habit of offering advice they wish they had been given to underclassmen. I have only one piece of advice and it applies to every possible grade: Get weird with it.
Do stuff that you’ll cringe at in less than a year. Wear sunglasses in class. Wear giant headphones literally everywhere you go. Hide tiny pictures of Danny Devito through central middle school with your best friend. Dye your hair without regard for staining your skin. Walk around with neon red fingers for a week. Lean over candles and accidentally set your hair on fire. Get intensely into kayaking for no good reason. Help get knives banned at Central Middle by gradually stealing the entire stock with your friend group. Join News4you and create exceptionally bad videos. Learn a thing or two while you’re at it.
Find something you’re good at and absolutely change the way you do it. Experiment with every possible extracurricular you could find interesting. Gift paper mache animals to teachers you love having. Createa paper mache menagerie in the library, mostly by accident. Spend way too much time in the library in general. Become known for hiding minecraft bees in classesyou had sophomore year. Hold parties and convince your general friend group that you’re an arsonist.
Lose friends. In many ways. Make more. Tell people you love them. Display your affection irrationally and without patience. Make things. Give people those things.
Talk pretentiously. Read fanfiction. Read fanfiction about slam poetry and decided that it sounds fun. Join slam poetry and get way too into it. Get better as you go. Win second place your last year.
Don’t forget that you’re still a kid. Own it. Take advantage of it. Make as many mistakes as you can, while they’re still cheap. They’ll get more expensive as you get older. Take advantage of the now. There’s resources available to you that you do not take advantage of- especially in the library. Use them.
The only way to enjoy yourself is to be yourself. If you’re pretending to be something you’re not, you’ll always have that strange feeling lurking behind you. Every teenager is genuinely cringe at their heart. Embrace it.
Give yourself something to look forward to looking back on. You’ll be nostalgic for this no matter what you do- why not be nostalgic for disaster. Let the aftermath stay after. Let after never come.
