Log with Liv

It is easy to say that senior year is a year of lasts. 

A bittersweet close to twelve years of growing, learning, making mistakes, and countless identities tried on along the way until deciding on the people we are right now. For twelve years, seven years, four years we have sat at each other’s sides and grown up. This year, I have found myself zoning out in class as I look around at the other students in the room, remembering when we were in preschool together. Remembering playdates in second grade, sharing a class in sixth grade. It is with a sense of pride that I find myself looking at my friends, my classmates. I know where we have come from. I know the discussions we have always had about the future. The plans made in a game of “MASH,” the Pinterest boards of college dorms made by preteens, the dreams laid out by young kids longing for the future. This semester, we stepped into that future. We are where we always dreamed of being, and there is certainly a sense of surrealness surrounding the fact that we are now living in what was always thought to be the distant future. 

This past year has been characterized at times by the sentiment that time is running out, childhoods ending and an 18-year-long safeguarding from the world coming to an end. As we grieved who we were though, we simultaneously applied to college, looking forward with excitement and anticipation to the next period of our lives. These coinciding looks forward and the subtle fear that we are moving ahead too quickly are difficult to reconcile. The range of human emotion is not supposed to be digestible, though. It is exactly the contrast between our senior year of “lasts” and the plentiful beginnings of our blossoming futures that have inspired us to live this year so fully. 

More than ever, I prioritize spending time with my friends and simply having fun. With Covid shrinking our time to be a teenager, it is hard not to feel like we have to make up for lost time. In a similar sense, I recently realized (years later than my peers, might I add) that school, while important, is not everything. I realized that some assignments can be turned in a day late (sorry Ms. Hitzeman!) and that sometimes being happy and present and just having fun is more important than the math quiz you have the next day.

This past semester has given me perspective. It is only with the end in sight that I have slowed down and taken time to reflect. We exist currently on the precipice of childhood and life. As we mingle on this edge, laughing, being, and taking in the view, an immense appreciation is developed for the people and experiences behind us, bridging us into the future. 

This year, I have become very conscious of how much I have changed. Evolved, even. I know with a certainty that I am everything that younger me hoped to be, and everything I could not know to hope for.

It is easy to grieve the time we no longer have. Coming into this year, I expected that it would be difficult to grapple with a period in which we all want to move forward into the next chapter of our lives while simultaneously holding onto some of the last pieces of carefree youth that we have left. It has surprised me to learn that the way in which I ultimately confronted this massive jumble of conflicting emotions was to place a great deal of value in the present moment. To hold the feelings of existing and being above all else. 

This year has taught me a joy unlike anything I have ever felt. To be situated in a beginning within an end, reflection is mandatory. There is a decision to make at this point, whether that be quickly moving forward or taking your time to slow the end. I have a bad habit of romanticizing things, of forcing beauty into places it does not belong, but I cannot express the extent to which I find it endearing that we have somehow as a group decided to navigate this period of waiting by living our lives as fully as possible. There is nothing more human than being faced with the decision to dwell on the past or sprint into the future and choosing the unseen third option: to take joy in the present.

To all the people beside me in this confusing, nostalgic, wonderful liminal space: we made it. Let’s enjoy it.