Closing Out High School & The Power of Choice

    High school has been a pretty shaping period of my life. The last four years spent transitioning from young teen to fresh adult while blanketed by the rigor of Troy High have been interesting to say the least. Academically speaking, I’ve learned a lot (though how much of it I retained is up for debate), which is to be expected as that’s Troy High’s brand. Throughout my years in high school, I questioned if academics were really the most important takeaway from my schooling. It’s certainly what I was told, be it explicitly or not, but it never felt to me truly as the most important thing. Education certainly was, but my academia sometimes felt like drivel, and my discontent with that state is what pushed me to this conclusion. 

Education was important to me, but in those situations where I was faced with an  18-page packet of regurgitating answers to questions we already went over in class, I could make a choice- do the packet in what I felt like was a waste of my time and detracted from my education, or skip the packet and take a zero for it- a lower grade but oddly, a better education. Of course, there is no way of knowing the outcome of making either choice. After all, I could skip it and end up finishing with an 89% in the class, that assignment being the one that would have pushed me to an A, or I could do it and just end up wasting my time and energy after all. Point is, there really is no way to know what the “right” choice is, but you still have to make one, and most importantly, stick by it. That is the most important takeaway from highschool for me: the power of choice, and my responsibility over my own decisions. Taking this out of the classroom, I’ve been faced with many situations during high school where I’ve had to make these choices. Oftentimes, I ended up being caught in the “making” stage of that choice, where my mind would just run in circles trying to run simulations of the future. It’s even more difficult when both options seem equally appealing or awful. What I’ve learned though is not to get stuck in that “making” stage. I’ll never figure out what the “right” choice is, and there may not even be one considering the absurdity of the universe. Moving into my adult life, I’ve equipped myself with the skill to trust in the choices I make and to stick by them. There’s no telling how the future will play out because there are simply far too many variables to consider, so the best we can do is just trust in the choices we make.