If High School Yearbooks Were Honest

Everyone who tells you high school should be the best time of your life is either lying or confused. They have forgotten all the duplicity, the ugly politics of popularity, the pregnancy pacts. Instead, those people cut out the very best memories, stitching them together into a patchwork, glossy narrative that they sincerely believe represents the best four years of their life. Or, if they had a yearbook staff, then someone else did it for them.

I suspect that most people who think high school is the pinnacle of existence just had a really kick-ass yearbook committee. It's easy while looking through an old yearbook to get lost in the nostalgia because it distills the simplest, sweetest moments of youth into black and white pages where other people have written kind things about you. It's a little like being at your own funeral, except all of the speakers are really inarticulate, terrible spellers who keep insisting on calling the afterlife "college."

So I think it's important every once in awhile to remind ourselves of exactly why we were so eager to graduate in the first place. What follows probably isn't written in any of your yearbooks verbatim, but I assure you that in all those notes from your friends, classmates and professors, the subtext is the same.