As I enter my senior year, I realize that the soon to be 12 years I have spent here have surprisingly gone by fast. In the moment, each year feels like it drags on, but looking back, I can’t even remember what life was like as a completely different person from who I am now.
Everybody goes through the weird and dorky stages of being a middle schooler. The transition of being a child to a tween can definitely be seen as odd. As a tween, most don’t have the greatest social skills, making most conversations uncomfortably awkward. You see cringey middle schoolers everywhere, from slamming the tops of door frames, and Tik Tok dancing in public. We see those things as not socially acceptable, but five years ago we did those same things, and thought we were legit. So what changes us, and allows us to be the person we are today? For you whether that life experiences from your home life, or the influence of social media. However, we most likely had to suffer through those awkward pre-teen stages to be where we are currently.
If you think back to yourself about who you were and what you looked like, you most likely think of yourself as either carrying that pubescent chub, or the extreme opposite. Maybe you remember getting your first pimple and trying to cover it up with your moms makeup. Either way, these memories bring us back to our insecurities and how hard we tried to hide them. Trying to fit in is something that everybody strives to do, even adults. We as a society will go to great lengths to appear as “cool” or respectable to our peers, but this behavior is heightened in the prime years of 11-14. The immature behavior we emitted as younger people all stemmed from wanting to fit in and wanting approval from others. In order to overcome this feeling of not being accepted, we had to first feel the pressure of hiding our insecurities.
Just because I have lived a couple more years, and passed the preteen window, doesn’t mean I’m completely not awkward and that I’m not insecure at all. However, I think most seniors feel that they feel confident enough in themselves to be who they are, and feel comfortable in that sense. We shouldn’t look back on our past selves and feel regret, but we should laugh at ourselves, and maybe be grateful we have changed for the better.