It all started out differently than I planned, but then again I don’t try to plan everything. Or maybe I do; I dunno, my daily schedule says differently. It’s difficult to describe my four years of focus in a place people call high school. It’s difficult to describe why I feel so drawn to stay yet desperately want to leave. It’s difficult to describe why I find high school to be a safe haven in a building of chaos. It’s difficult to explain why I want to relive my four years here over again and watch every miniscule detail go by, especially when there are scenes of pain, gore and sorrow. Like I said, high school turned out differently than I’d planned.

I began high school with a philosophy, one that I didn’t know I had until about junior year: that I would not get close to anyone. I know my freshman year English teacher hated the idea, especially during my sophomore year when she knew I needed to discuss what catastrophes were unwinding in my life. It’s just the way I am; why get close, why talk to someone when you won’t get to spend time with them after you move on. I didn’t want to open my life up even to people that I knew I’d see for more than just a year, who I’d spend the majority of my days with. It’s just the way I am.

But the way I am ended up ruining the philosophy I had set for high school. I, for the first two years, sought after people to get close to, to be able to call best friends, but that isn’t possible when you won’t open up about who you are. Yes, I did — do — have best friends, but I did not see them as people to hang out with outside of school. If I did, I’d be afraid they’d really see me for who I was. Cliche, I know, but I am not who people think I am. In turn, my best friends from school stayed at school, my best friends from gym stayed at gym and my best friends from swimming and cross country stayed at swimming and cross country. That’s how things were supposed to be.

Then things went south. I lost family members to drugs and death, lost friends to college and ultimately lost my idea of what I wanted to be. No, I did not go off the deep end and end up a druggy, but I did go off the end of too much focus. I think that’s the definition of addiction, to continuously do something that hurts you, or something along those lines. I’m not sure, but I would bet to say that I had an addiction. I became addicted to my eating habits, to my school work and to my workouts. I ended up tearing myself to pieces. These events ended my first two years of high school, with much more changing the next two.

To begin, my junior and senior years did not get worse as I might have made it seem but instead mellowed out. I went in more confident than previous years and knew that the catastrophic events of previous years were, as I said, previous, never to haunt me. That’s what I hoped for, but the death of a father and a felon for a brother messes with you. I needed a grounding point and my sports weren’t able to provide that for me. They fluctuated between good and bad, exceptional and mediocre. I needed a person to show me affection and warmth, more than what my friends were doing. Ultimately I found that person, and he helped me find where I had gone, where my happiness had blown off to.

Now, after a year of being with my significant other, I have but weeks left of this place known as high school. I have but months until college. I have years to create a life, and all this seems to come so fast. In the end I learned that no matter what happens within the first years of a set time period such as high school or college, something or someone will give you what you might’ve lost in that time period. Something or someone will help you be who you are or what you are to be.