I’ll be honest with you, high school is possibly the worst thing ever. In middle school and elementary school, we were too young to have real nostalgia or a sense of impermanence, and so leaving was easy. We only hang onto high school because it’s the only thing we know we can’t go back to, but, in truth, high school is terrible.

In a high school, people do things that they would be put in jail for outside of it. I’ve seen assault, battery, larceny, sexual harassment of every conceivable degree, and I once saw someone sneeze into someone else’s soup. Why would you even do that? It wasn’t an accident, he laughed about it, and sneezed into the poor guy’s thermos. You might as well just sucker punch his dog, if you’re going to be that ridiculously bad of a person. Arguments like “boys will be boys” keep bullies doing the same things they always do, and high school girls are the meanest thing since middle school girls.

Our environment is all stress, from class to class. With hours of homework and even more hours of studying, and your entire future on the line, combined with the fact that every college in the world is judging you based on your years of puberty,  this is the most turbulent time in anyone’s life. We could just throw darts in the middle of the hallway and whoever shouts gets into college, and we’d achieve about the same result.

People are going to cry because they can ‘never see people again’ but that sentiment is obsolete because of the internet, so any isolation you experience your own fault. So, to the graduating class of senior year, stop crying, this place is awful. Whatever you so choose to do, nobody is going to call you a loser for doing it.

What you should remember about high school is the people, the good people, the people you like. Retain contact for as long as you can and live in a way that makes you happy. If you can perform both of these actions, you will never miss high school because the only thing that will be replaced is the hyper-stressful environment that you’re forced into every moment of every day, combined with being forced to attend social events and hang out with people.

We can actually live in a place where we don’t have to worry about absolutely random fights breaking out at any place at any time, we can actually work at a place that pays us instead of loading work onto us 24/7 and requires us to show up at ridiculous hours of the morning. I honestly don’t care what time you wake up every morning, taking an actual academic course at 7 in the morning is like coming up with an analogy a day before publication.

Life is going to get so much better, in so many ways. This isn’t a time to cry. We can hold onto the bonds we’ve made. This is a time to realize that we’re breaking free of the prison that everyone is required to be in. We can stop trying to make the best of a bad situation and start trying to make the best of a great situation, one full of real opportunity. Trust me, you won’t miss it.