Yearbooks Evoke An Inevitable Nostalgia
For almost everybody a look through old high school yearbooks elicits a twinge of nostalgia
. Our high school years may have been great or terrible, fun or frustrating, but regardless of how we felt then, when we look back now there's always something about those memories that's special.
The high school years aren't easy. For everybody, the immense physical, emotional, and intellectual changes that we go through during that time keep us off balance. We're expected to act grown up because we're starting to look like adults, but we're still kids at heart, more interested in play than anything else. We're emotionally and financially tied to our parents, but we're also straining for our freedom.
Although the bonds we make during high school are probably the strongest of our lives, high school is competitive. Whatever objective is important to us, whether it's making the starting line of the football team or getting into a great college, we have to compete with all the other students who share that objective. What's more, the physical and hormonal changes of puberty create, for the first time in our lives, a drive toward dominance. We establish a hierarchy, and we naturally want to ascend to its apex.
And while we compete with the other students who share the objectives that are important to us, there is also intense competition between the cliques that chase each of those objectives. There's a group competing for the starting line. There's a group competing for elite college entry. The members of both of those groups make heavy investments of time and energy toward their goal, and they pit themselves against each other in a struggle over whether football or college is more important.
Competition aside, high school is a time for big dreams and plans for the future. Nearly every high school couple discusses getting married and having kids, regardless of how impractical that outcome really is. High school athletes dream of getting to the big leagues. Drama geeks dream of landing a big movie role. Class leaders dream of successful business careers or political aspirations. It is a time for feeding the ambition that will carry us into our future.
Life after high school rarely bears much resemblance to the plans we made in our teens. We soon discover that life is more about great obstacles than it is about great expectations. We find that our high school sweetheart, sweet as he or she may be, is just one fish in a sea full of fish. Unpredictable events change our direction dramatically, which is sometimes to our benefit and sometimes to our detriment, but which rarely takes us on the course we envisioned. We change our ambitions and our tactics as we stop imagining the life we will lead and start to live the life we're given.
As teenagers, we were vibrantly and awkwardly alive. It was a glorious time in its way, but as we grow up we set aside the parts of ourselves that don't fit in the real world. We become less naive. Our grand illusions break off and fall away. The people we are during our teen years are unique versions of ourselves, like uncooked pies, full of potential and yet incomplete.
Still, that time and those parts of ourselves are not gone entirely. The things that were important to us - our friends, our goals, our dreams - are all captured to some extent in our high school yearbooks. That's what makes those volumes so special. We keep them so we don't forget who we were when we started.
by: BelndaCarson
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