Dear 10th Grade,
I am afraid of you. I’m scared that you will be just like every other school year. I’m scared that you will last too long, and I’ll grow bored of you too quickly. I’m scared that you will be gone too soon.
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that I’m writing this right now.
I cannot believe that I’m currently working on my first column of my sophomore year of high school. I haven’t actually written anything in months, and yet it feels like I was just finishing my final column of ninth grade last week.
I vividly remember sitting in room 139 on the last day of school and feeling an overwhelming sense of panic at the thought that an entire fourth of my high school experience was gone, and I was almost completely unchanged by it.
In the 10 and a half months that I had spent in high school so far, nothing extraordinarily interesting had happened to me. Nothing had changed my life in any major way.
I felt anxiety crawling up my spine as I sat through the last few minutes of my first year of high school because I knew I was identical to the person who had entered the classroom almost a year prior.
Not only that, but I felt like the same exact person who had entered and left every single class I had for the past three years. If you had asked me on the last day of school how I felt, I would have said, “Like a seventh grader.”
I don’t really know what changed in the three short months of summer; part of me feels like it was simply the abundance of sunlight that eclipsed the memory of dreary grayscale walls.
Whatever it was, it helped me to allow myself the realization that if I accepted the passing of time, that did not mean time would start speeding up. If I let go of the years that have passed since 2020, that does not mean it will suddenly become 2030, and I’ll have to do it all over again.
So, I gave myself the luxury of time. I let myself lay out on the grass in my backyard, I let the sun seep into my bones and warm me to my core, and I let myself think about the person I have become.
The person who is changing and evolving into a better version of herself, even when I do not allow myself to acknowledge her existence.
I’m still scared of you, sophomore year. I’m still terrified that my alarm will go off one day, I’ll wake up, and you’ll be gone, leaving me with no memory or proof that you were ever here at all.
But, I also know that no matter how much of myself still feels like the same girl from three years ago, I actually did leave her behind when I left seventh grade, the same way I left my eighth-grade self back in the doors of the middle school, and my ninth-grade self three months in the past.
I can finally recognize the passage of time without feeling a jolt in my stomach and a lump in my throat that makes eating too difficult and speaking nearly impossible.
So I hope you will be good to me, sophomore year. I hope you will be vibrant and exhilarating, and I hope I feel alive when I’m with you.
If I have to ask one thing from you, it is this: please don’t let me fall back into the trap of boredom and dullness that engulfed my life last year. Please let me live free from the choking fear of passing time. Please let me live.
With desperate hope and slight trepidation,
a sophomore.
