It’s been three whole years since we took our first step(s) through the big doors of high school, and towards the outer world most live in. We are no longer huddled in groups of giggling underclassmen, afraid to go to the bathroom by ourselves, and we are not racing around the halls like middle schoolers. (Ha-ha, well, some of us aren’t.) It doesn’t matter what we look like or what we wear, because as seniors, we realize we’re becoming more confident about who we are, and our potential in the life outside of our cocoon we call ‘high school’.

Every year after freshman year becomes easier to manage, except for the homework. Each and every one of us has become better friends with others as we all have ‘tried’ to mature into the adults we will someday become. We all have our ups and downs and the people who we don’t get along with, but we also have the people who do care about us and will help us with what we need, whether our friends, teachers, or our families.

High school is just one of the bumps in the road on our way to adulthood. It does not solely help us nor hurt us. It does both. It helps us become the people we graduate as, but it also hurts us by the maturity or lack there of, and the hurt that comes along with those attempting to mature, and how they handle themselves. As seniors we have managed to start to grow out of what we were and did as underclassmen.

Becoming a senior was no big deal. For me, I realized at the end of my sophomore year, that next year, my junior year, was my last year to feel almost free from the pressures, or more so the expectations of what I was to become. When I finally realized the year had come, and I was now a senior, I felt as if I was on top of the world without stepping over the boundaries, of course. Being a senior is extremely empowering, only in the realization that we have made it to the top, but strangely, just to leave high school and start all over again in a bigger more engrossing school: College.

I have figured out now, after going through half of my senior year, that we are no different than anyone else. It’s just how we perceive ourselves.

No one really realizes until they have been, or become a senior, how much most of us now feel the need to move on and depart from what we have always known. We need to discover ourselves as well as our potential in the world. As seniors, we are tired of having to occupy our time with tedious busy work and the constant hassle of who’s going to start the next rumor. As 2006 has come to a close, and 2007 has begun, we seniors are hopefully going to embrace the future and what it brings, and meet every challenge with our heads held high in order to prosper in the future.