Things taken away

Of all the new habits I incorporated into my day-to-day life within the last year, perhaps my favorite has been the journal I began to construct with scraps of paper cut out of newspaper, receipts and tickets and clippings and photographs. I started sending a lot of mail while at home too, and hand in hand with that hobby went several others: I learned to carve stamps out of rubber and a friend and I took to making recycled paper by pouring pulp through a screen and drying sheets out in her backyard. I am excited by the prospect of being able to close this chapter of my life with some permanency, and be able to look back on a physical record kept of everything going on should I choose to, and ideally from a better place both personally and around me. Moreover, it helped reinforce the importance of maintaining relationships with loved ones and friends, even after lapses in communication or prolonged physical distance.

Beyond that, I may be lacking in solid lessons learned from high school; the wisdom I have to impart on a younger generation is limited and littered with mistakes, probably garnered more from pure luck and accident than any real strategy.

One example of a pure stroke of luck that drastically changed the trajectory of my path beyond high school occurred after one of the sleep-deprived weeks early into my junior year that seemed to drag on forever. Much to my dismay at the time, I slept completely through the alarm I had set on a Saturday morning to go take my SAT exam. One partial refund and several attempts to schedule a new test later (appointments were beginning to get canceled with the descent of COVID onto the unsuspecting public school system), I ended up not taking it at all. Freed from the burden of prep books and tutoring sessions, I ended up being able to skip the test completely and fully focus on essay writing. Any other year, I would have berated the College Board’s overpriced and totally irrelevant measuring of intelligence, but begrudgingly taken the test anyway.

Several years before I was of college-applying age, I inherited some words of wisdom from an upperclassman that I tried to remember when the name-dropping of institutions and comparison of SAT scores became the only apparent topic of conversation between many of my peers: You do not have to tell anyone where you are applying to college, and actually I encourage you don’t. I found that this was really helpful in minimizing the pressure on myself, and avoiding putting pressure on anyone else, and even though decisions plastered across social media were unavoidable it really helped to manage my own stress throughout the process.

High school for current teenagers can be a really stressful experience, especially here, deep in the Silicon Valley where virulent competition between students or parental pressure to succeed can feel overwhelming. If I could do it all again, I think I would do more to immerse myself in the things I really enjoyed doing, which very much included my time interning at the Daily Journal, and cutting down on all the extra noise. I think the piece of advice I will be doing my best to pass down will be that doing anything you’re not truly passionate about is a waste of everyone’s time, but especially your own. And time spent in high school, though at first seems mercilessly long, is really quite finite.

Josette Thornhill is a recent graduate of Aragon High School in San Mateo. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.