Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: the transition from high school to beyond and the frustration and distress that can arise when your mental transition is ahead of or behind reality.
I recently went hiking with my friend Oliver, and he and I haven’t really been able to connect and talk to each other since the pandemic began. Which means, as weird as it feels to say, that it’s been almost a year. Disregarding the shock of the passage of time, that’s a really long time! So it was nice to be able to reconnect. Oliver is also currently a senior in high school, and we’ve been good friends since we were 8 or 9. If he listens to this, he’ll laugh at it, but I was kind of taken aback by how grown-up he seems. When you grow up with someone, as Oliver and I have, you don’t notice them growing taller or older in manner, but after a year of not really interacting much, you suddenly realize how much they’ve changed since you met all those years ago. Fortunately for me, it seems as though we’ve changed and grown into ourselves in much the same way, so it felt like meeting your new best friend with none of the awkward and all of the love. Because yeah, in a similar way, I came to realize how much I’ve grown up since we became friends in third grade. We sat in the parking lot together for an hour after we stopped hiking, because we had more to talk about. We checked his oil because his light was on, and I lamented about how someone hit my car in the school parking lot when I went to take an exam. We got deep about empathy and how talking about emotions is hard. We joked about our siblings and about each other. We recounted a lot of memories, good and bad.
Over the course of our conversation, our diction around the memories caught my attention. I noticed that we were talking about high school as if it was something in the past, as if we were already done and moved on. Both of us had referred to our “high school friends” or “friends we had in high school,” and noted that we don’t talk to many of them anymore. We referred to our current schooling as just our “classes,” and our discussions about college felt much more grounded in the present, despite college being something of the future.
Though we moved on from talk about high school, the way we had engaged with the topic stuck with me. Obviously, we’re still in high school – still taking classes, finishing credits to graduate, taking senior pictures, and thinking about clubs – but in a lot of ways, this year hasn’t felt like the rest of high school. I mean, clearly it’s different. But I don’t think I expected it to feel as far removed from the rest of my high school experience as it does. I think it has been helped by the fact that I took a lot of classes I wouldn’t normally have taken this year, so I’ve been in classes with lots of people I didn’t know, which is unusual for me. I’ve also not been connecting with my classmates, like, at all, so I’ve been disconnected from the social environment of high school before the academic one. It’s surprising how quickly my and Oliver’s friend groups have become “our high school friends who we don’t talk to anymore.” We’ve both kept a few, but our circles have shrunk enough to feel like we’ve left high school social groups entirely behind.
Acting in tandem with this disconnection from high school is a transition to college that feels faster than normal. I have a pretty unusual situation where my dream college is deep in my academic safety range and I can confidently afford it. It’s also been my dream college for about three years. So, for those past three years, my college plans have been pretty much set in stone. I applied Early Action in November, got accepted with more scholarship money than I expected, and now the only reason I haven’t officially committed is that I just haven’t gotten around to it yet, not that I’m still making up my mind. Looking around at my remaining friends and their current experience applying to colleges, I can see that we’re definitely not having the same experience. A lot of the uncertainty in my college application process was minor and resolved quickly, so the reality and certainty of college has set in a lot faster. I basically have nothing left to do to prepare for college besides actually preparing to physically move there.
So what happens when students who feel like their high school experience is already over and who see college as much more of a thing of the present still have to attend high school classes every day? Well… it’s weird, I can tell you that much. I think the biggest feeling I’m having is stagnation. My mind has separated from what I understand to be high school, but it can’t move on to what I expect to be college because I have this sort of nameless, formless, virtual reality that is Horticulture 1, African American Studies, and AP Statistics. It is high school, but I don’t perceive it that way because it is so different from what I knew before the pandemic, and because I know that what I understand to be high school is over and I won’t ever be returning to it. So I’m living in this in-between space that is constantly changing where nobody ever knows exactly what’s going on, and… I kind of don’t know what to do with it? Every day feels the same, but time is passing as always. I’m writing this on the one-year anniversary of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, and I remember that day so clearly, and all the days between then and now make up an experience completely removed from the concept of time. It’s a complicated place to be because my mental transition out of high school has already begun, but I’m still slogging through whatever this is, and it feels like no time is passing but it’s also passing so fast, and all of that combined makes it feel like I’m making no progress towards anything.
I feel like I should take this moment to acknowledge that this might be the most typical teenagery thinking you’ve ever heard, and maybe I think I’m more mature and moved on than I am. I don’t know! I’ve never been a teenager before.
With that perspective in mind, here arrives another complication. My expectation was to have another year of high school, and after that, prepare for college. Instead, that expected last year of high school was replaced with something that reads as… not that, to my brain, and the mental transition to college feels like it has come sooner than expected. However, I worry that this effective loss of a year of high school has actually set my mental preparation back instead of forwards. I think it’s fueled in part by the fact that I know that I’ve had no well-known milestones marking the end of high school. No senior homecoming, probably no prom, graduation up in the air. I didn’t have a particularly pleasant split with the club I was the most active in, so no senior night or senior speech at the end of the year. Some of these things I cared about more than others, but all were markers of the end of high school, and in a way, provided closure to a chapter of our lives. I know high school isn’t that impactful in the long run, but for a person who is 18 years old, I’ve spent like 20% of my life in high school. Which is, in my opinion, kind of a lot. In online school, at least in my experience, the biggest marker of the end of high school is teachers saying, “you’re seniors, right? So you’re fine, you get this, you can do that.”
Not to be a whiny kid or anything, but I’ve felt pretty alone this year. I spent the whole first semester as the only person with my camera on in three out of four classes, and in the fourth, I was one of many faceless black screens because my social confidence can only hold out for so long. If you’re a regular listener, you may remember the open letter to my school’s administration that I wrote about mental health, and that letter got me promptly kicked off the Mental Health Team with the message, and I quote, “I think the most important thing is for you to focus on you graduating,” and then radio static. Not ideal. It feels like instead of high school having several ending milestones, it’s sort of floundered to a mid-semester halt, except we still have classes to take. So while I might feel ready for it to be over, how do I know that I actually am?
This isn’t a particularly useful worry, since there’s no way to know whether or not it’s true until I actually get to college, but its lack of usefulness doesn’t stop it from existing. So that thought is also here, chilling in the back of my brain, contradicting some feelings of preparation and maturity and agreeing with others of insecurity and confusion over online school. One thing that consistently both frustrates and fascinates me about the human condition is our ability to think, feel, and be many wildly contradicting things at once, and that’s completely normal and should happen. One of my most common comments in therapy these days is “it’s okay and also hard,” to which my therapist typically responds, “It’s both and it’s okay for it to be both.”
When I’m trying to sort through my thoughts and feelings about the end of high school, it’s important to remember that all change can be hard, and that the transition from high school and what comes next is hard for everybody in different ways. This year, it’s just hard in another different way. It’ll turn out okay, you know? Uncertainty is stressful, as we all learned time and time again in 2020, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll keep learning that lesson forever.
Which sounds unpleasant, but in a way, it’s another reminder that I don’t know anything and that there will always be more to learn. I was thinking about that tagline earlier today and how it might sound stressful and full of uncertainty in itself, but for me, the knowledge that there will always be more to learn helps me fight perfectionism and keeps me open to learning new things. It’s reassuring, in a way. As stressful and uncertain as every single day in 2020 was, somehow, now we’re here. And no matter how worried I am about the future or how frustrated I feel being stuck in whatever this senior year is, I know that time will keep moving along at its own consistent pace, even if it feels nightmarishly slow or way, way too fast. We’ll get there, and in the meantime, we live in today. We go to class. We write a podcast. We read an essay. We text a friend. We take a walk and look at the sky. We draw with sticks in the mud and watch sprouts appear out of the ground as an undeniable sign of the passage of time.
This isn’t entirely related, but it came to mind as I was writing this episode. When I was still active in theater, there was a mantra or prayer of sorts that the actors always said before a play. We would gather in a loose circle, hold hands, and then someone would lead the prayer, usually the director or lead or just a cast member whom everyone held in high regard. After they finished the words, we held the silence together for as long as felt right, then we would wish each other good luck and continue on our way. It was a quiet acknowledgement of each other, of the work we did, and of respect for ourselves. It’s probably the most quiet and focused that we ever were, and it always helped me slip into the zone before a play. With help from a friend, I remembered the words, and I’ll leave it with you now.
If you’re a person of prayer, we covet those prayers. If not, chant your mantra, center your chi, think happy thoughts, or do whatever it is that you do as we center our hearts and minds together.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I have some interesting projects in the works, some guests lined up, so be sure to follow this podcast so you never miss an episode. You can also follow me on Twitter for updates, @FastFactsPod. This is Callie, signing off.
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