In general: positive. I’m still in high school, but it’s coming to an end. I graduate on June 4th of this year. I’m a little sad about this segment of time (2005–2009) being over. Of course I want to move on and be in college now, but it’s a way of life going away; it’s a lot of friends going away too. Overall, I liked being in high school. Sure, some classes were better than others, I found the work boring and tedious sometimes and I even skipped school a couple times. No one wants to come to school every morning at 8:00 A.M. But I made some very good friends during high school and have many memories from this period of my life. I’ve had a lot of fun with those people and luckily there’s Facebook and photos so it won’t soon be forgotten. Not to mention that I was on websites like this one from May 2006 until now, which covers the tail end of my freshman year through my senior year. I enjoyed that greatly, even with some of the negativity.
A lot of people complain about high school years being “hell” and what not; just wasn’t the case for me. Obviously I found a way to make the most out of it. Yes, my voice didn’t change until I was 16, yes I was 5’0” freshman year and am still short. But I found that people may have even liked me more for those things; I was never picked on, not in high school, not in middle school, not in elementary school. I’ve found the schoolwork mostly easy, I get good grades, nothing to complain about in that field other than that I’ve had some bad/boring classes in the past and of course, boring/bad assignments that I don’t want to do. I achieved my academic goals and I got to play a sport I enjoy (track).
I never felt much pressure to conform or anything. I do what I want, I wear what I want, I act the way I want and I always have. Don’t care what other people think and generally that hasn’t been brought to my attention too much. Felt a little pressured to smoke weed sometimes, but I still never did it.
The worst thing about my high school time was simply the fact that I’m gay and have been my entire high school time but still have not told anyone and because of that was never truly being my full self. During this time I really came to terms with my sexuality. In the beginning of high school way back in late 2005 I was thinking about pretending to be straight and all that, now I’ve completely turned that around. I know that my life would have been very different if I had told people about it, but I chose not to. I tend to think that it would have been worse, but I have no way of knowing that. That’s really the only thing I think about doing differently as in “what if I had come out in freshman year? Would that have been a good idea?”
I’ll never know.