Glory Days

Being a teenager is all about reliving the supposed best days of your life. It's about taking a look big and seeing how far you've come. It's flipping through the pages of your life like the picture filled work that is your high school yearbook. It's about being conscious of you are now, as opposed to who you were before. It's about never forgetting where you've been. It's the glory days.

*Here's another one - fresh off the video editor, the accompanying vlog post all about rethinking and encountering those godforsaken high school glory days. Enjoy.

High school is one of the most memorable places of all time. It cannot be denied that high school is your first real taste of the world. Everything is thrown at your from relationships, to friendships, school work, jobs, community service, and all the excessive drama in between. High school is your entire life when you're in it and when you finish your four years it's unbelievable. Looking back at high school now seems like it was only yesterday that I'd finished up and moved on, but that's an experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Going back to visit my old high school definitely triggered so many memories of all the awkward embarrassing moments that make me want to cringe, the super depressing days where I absolutely despised everyone, and the moments where I'd geek out laughing every once in a while. It's true that bad in every memory sticks out more than the good, and even though I vividly remember all the traumatizing incidents, backstabbing, betrayal, gossip, lies, cliques and fights, that's not a completely accurate representation of my high school experience. The place overall wasn't bad, of course, it was all the other kids that went there. I remember my idiotic ideas of social status and who you could talk to. There was like a force field that prevented people from speaking from the popular kids and the jocks. Then somehow I joined the populars and was on the inside. I found my niche of well-behaved, overachieving, perfectionist, well-dressed kids. Did we dominate our school, quite possibly yes but that whole social hierarchy thing is both the best and worth thing about high school. Yeah, it's great to be well liked, well known and respected, but for those you aren't it can be a terrible experience. I would know, I was on the other side of the social ladder in my early high school years. In college, I started off with that same ideology like there was such thing as popularity and after so many people telling me no, I've come to find out that it still exists and I have a feeling there will always be popular kids. In college, it's the people you see always around campus who are involved in everything and everyone knows them or "of" them - exhibit "A" me, myself and I. Have I achieved a high status of notoriety? I guess so - does it matter in the grand scheme of things, maybe ... maybe not. I just happen to know a lot of people, and a lot of people know me. Let me tell you, there's nothing wrong with being popular, it's what you do with it that makes the difference. You can choose to make other people feel important (even though everyone is no matter who they are) or make them feel small and irrelevant. The choice is yours. We're supposed to have grown up by now but I've realized some things never change. The high school popularity complex is a lifelong thing. That means forever living up to your glory days.

High school has this profound effect on me. I can't really explain it - just the anxiety it brought me on a daily basis (and it still brings it on me when I think about) was unreal. I think for me the whole thing about high school was those social barriers and the fact that people were not capable of speaking to you if they weren't in your group or adjacent to it on the social ladder. In college, yeah I've got the people I talk to, but random people who are nothing like me will come and talk to me, or me to them and we can carry a conversation. In high school it was a stark rarity if that ever happened. I don't miss high school for all the staring, all the rumors and the amount of shadiness that went down. College people still stare (I'm used to it - I get it, I'm black *BTW, it's sad that I'm used to it) but the rumor mill on runs on a smaller scale. You only hear about drama from your floor, or your little friend group (unless you're unnecessarily connected like me, and then know way too much for your own good). Now, the whole shadiness thing - that's people dropping names, and talking about everyone else's business plus all the unsanctioned nonsense behind closed doors, as in the big three (drugs, sex, and alcohol). Check out my third post of this week about all that jazz, but for now, know that in college those become way more apparent. High school is where you grow but it's a control environment, college is where you can be whatever or whoever you want, untamed, uncut, and unedited. There's a reason so many TV shows are based in high school, 9O21O, Pretty Little Liars, Degrassi, South of Nowhere, Jane By Design, Teen Wolf, Awkward, the Inbetweeners, the Vampire Diaries and the list goes on and on. High school is the hot bed of drama. Every thing is heightened, and seems like a really big deal in the moment, but when it's all said and done a lot of things turn out to not have mattered. It's that blowing things out of proportion that makes high school the perfect place for all the craziness to happen. It's an emotionally charged center always ready to explode. Oh the glory days of in class yelling matches, hallway tell offs, lockdown drug busts, stairway hook ups, and lockeroom brawls. High school.

Being a teenager is all about remembering your roots. You can never forget your past or run away from it. It stays with you your entire life. Embrace it, learn from it, and try not to make the same mistakes. No matter your high school story, it's still your high school story. It happened, plain and simple. You can choose to relive those glory days forever and ever or make some new glory days in the present.

My blog post question for the day is ... were you popular in high school, and what social circle did you run with? Why yes I was - uhm, I was with the student government, dominating notable kids society or something like that.