We’ve all heard it before: High school is supposed to be the best four years of your life. But let’s be honest. That statement is not just misleading, it’s damaging. This ideal is ripped straight from the scripts of feel-good Hollywood films: football games, shallow drama, carefree parties and a complete absence of real responsibility or problems. The reality is that for the overwhelming majority of teens, this fantasy does not come close to reality. Yale News stated that 75 percent of high school students self-reported having had negative feelings about their high school experiences.
High school takes place at a very awkward time in life — for most people, is chaotic and confusing. Relationships have to be built and managed, schoolwork has to be balanced with sports and extracurriculars and your mind and body are constantly changing. One may enter high school as a pre-pubescent, sub-five-foot-tall, awkward child with no social skills or experience in the real world. When they exit those doors for the last time, those characteristics have likely changed. They will not only have changed physically, but also mentally and emotionally.
The myth that high school should be the best years of your life sets up a cruel comparison. If you didn’t thrive in those four years – if they were isolating, painful, or just plain boring – you might feel like you somehow failed at the most fun part of your life. Especially with the one-sided narrative many high schoolers portray on social media, it is incredibly easy to feel like your high school experience is falling short of what it should be. Whether that’s in comparison to how you look, the relationships you maintain, or the parties that you are going to, comparison in this light can be incredibly harmful. Cybersmile, an award-winning nonprofit dedicated to digital well-being, found that 90 percent of young people see themselves negatively and feel dissatisfied with their lives because of social media.
Despite these beliefs that many teens hold, high school is in no way meant to be the quintessential four-year experience of one’s life. High school is the time to make mistakes, learn, and grow as a person. Throughout high school, teens are learning how to balance, organize, manage and most importantly, learn, making this perfect experience a falsehood. Only because the changing brain is harder to conceptualize than physical abilities – such as playing an instrument or sport – do youth lack the self awareness to understand how inaccurate the myth of the high school years is. It would be laughable to expect Tom Brady to have been his best at 16 years old, similarly, no logical human would expect Taylor Swift to have the best voice at 17. It is through the human experience that we learn and grow, and one’s “peak” should be once one truly understands who they are as an individual. According to Medium, the average ages at which people self-report their “peak” in life are between 25 and 35, but every person experiences life differently.
Being a teenager is hard. Teenagers are impulsive, emotional and make poor decisions. While reflecting on their high school years, many people will not remember the football games or the crazy parties they attended. They will remember how difficult it was to be a teenager in high school. High school is not an amazing experience for everyone, and in no way should a teen feel guilty or despairing if their experience is the same.
High school is not the best four years of life. For some people it is the worst, hardest, most boring or overwhelming four years of their life. One’s best years of their life come at different times and for different reasons. When reflecting on your high school years, it is important to remember that as long as you walked out of those doors as a different person than you entered four years prior, you didn’t waste it. And that is enough.
