If you consider the past eighteen years of my life, my "peak" would probably fall somewhere in the past four. If you really want to get picky I think the best year of my life thus far was 2012. I was in Mr. Chau's fourth-grade homeroom, One Direction's debut album was making waves, and my parents had finally bought me an iPhone 3GS. In more recent years I'd say 2019, or maybe that first quarter of 2020. It's hard to claim a best moment when you've lived so few.
Peaking in high school is widely regarded as a horrible, horrible fate. One relegated to blonde prom queens, teenage newlyweds, suburban heirs of small family businesses, and student-athletes that don't make it much further than varsity bench. To say you peaked in high school is saying you somehow thrived in an environment that is a kind of medieval torture for the majority of the population. The statement is saved for bullies who asserted dominance on their peers, pretty girls and pretty boys who never became much more, and those with skill sets that serve very minimal purpose in the adult world. It's a shameful reality, that one was at their happiest for four years in the first quarter of their life. To be sentenced to relive those glory days in order to avoid the complete mediocrity of the reality it has brought you. A high school peak is synonymous with an adult life of nothingness.
I say all this to explain the shame I feel after my first semester of college. To be frank, it sucked. I've got like next to zero friends, I spend most of my time in my room rewatching the same shows and rereading the same books, my roommate and I are acquaintances at best, and all the things that made me special and different for eighteen years, are meaningless. I'm not "the girl who dances", or the class' "most creative", I'm not called well-spoken or highly intelligent. I'm just another girl with a 4.0 who did extracurriculars in high school. I thought I wanted to be somewhere no one knew me. Somewhere I was forced to forge my own identity instead of relying on the part I'd been so carefully playing for all of my life. But it just feels disorienting. Like I was this character on a show being written by a room of experienced producers and executives, and they'd all up and left, and now it's the middle of season 5b and everything's all wrong and the plot is imploding and suddenly the Emmy award-winning show isn't even nominated.
I try to be optimistic. Of course, I can't make conclusions about the trajectory of my life based on four months. Of course I didn't peak in high school, I hated it! But there are questions that have planted themselves into the back of my mind. Insecurities that have taken root right between hope and excitement. I miss my parents, I hate the food here, I miss my friends, people are so weird, I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready. As much as I try and justify my feelings about college, it all comes down to that. I wasn't ready. Yeah sure, I'm eighteen, I graduated high school, I had all the time in the world to process, but that doesn't change my reality. My reality stopped, frozen in time, for lack of a better term, nearly two years ago. I stopped maturing and I started regressing. The two and a half years of high school I had were filled with tears and social anxiety and existential crises, yet now when I looked back, it was fondly. I was romanticizing the lunchroom that I once avoided at all costs, praying for one more year with people that made me miserable day after day. I was stuck in the what if. What if I had finished junior year? Would it have been better? Would I have found my groove? Maybe I'd have had a boyfriend, a prom date, more friends. Maybe I'd have ended up at a different college, with a different major.
I can't accept that those questions will never be answered. I keep thinking that one day I'll wake up and it'll be two years ago and all of this will never have happened. That I'll get to finish what I started. 17 was a year I waited for. I just knew it would be the best one yet. I'd have my license, freedom to come and go as I pleased. I'd drive myself to school and go off campus for lunch. I'd be captain of my dance team, leading warm-ups and rehearsals. My friends would be more than moving boxes on a group facetime. They'd come over for sleepovers and kickbacks. I should have had more. I could have had so much more than this. This, two years later, is so hard. To move on from something you never even got to experience. To grieve your own life and a life that could've been.
Nobody wants to peak in high school, but what might be even worse is missing your peak altogether.
It's winter break and when I hang out with my friends I can see that discontent in their eyes. In the way that we all so cautiously approach the subject of college. We feel the same hollowness. The shame of admitting how hard it's been to move on and grow up. Our conversations are repeated phrases from a depressing script. Afraid to knock down that wall and admit what we're all so scared of.
I don't know what's next, how to fix what's been broken. But I externalize. I tell my friends how sucky my life feels so that theirs might seem a little better in comparison. We break the wall and relish in our shared experiences. It won't turn back time, but at least I'm not alone. I never have been. And I'm gonna keep hoping that peak is up ahead somewhere because I don't know what I'll do if it isn't.