For almost everybody a look through old high school yearbooks elicits a twinge of nostalgia. Our high school years may have been great or terrible, fun or frustrating, but regardless of how we felt then, when we look back now there's always something about those memories that's special.
High school isn't easy for anybody. We are going through immense changes - physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We are straining for our freedom, but we are still financially and emotionally dependent on our parents. We look more and more like adults, and we are expected to behave as though we are adults, but we're still just kids, far less mature than we seem or pretend to be.
Even though our memories of high school revolve around friends, the experience is heavily focused on competition as well. We each choose what is important to us. An athlete might aspire to make the starting line on the football team. A smart kid might aspire to get into a good school. Whatever objective we choose, we're not the only ones, and we lock ourselves into competition with everybody else who's pursuing the same goal. To make matters worse, dominance drives emerge for the first time during puberty, so for the first time we are aware of hierarchies. Inevitably, once we're aware of them we want to be on top.
And while we compete with the other students who share the objectives that are important to us, there is also intense competition between the cliques that chase each of those objectives. There's a group competing for the starting line. There's a group competing for elite college entry. The members of both of those groups make heavy investments of time and energy toward their goal, and they pit themselves against each other in a struggle over whether football or college is more important.
Although we spend much of our high school years chasing short-term objectives, we make long-range plans as well, and these have a lasting effect on our lives. Every high school student is a dreamer. It's what we're supposed to do during those years. If we're a drama geek, we dream of winning an Oscar. If we're a jock, we dream of a championship ring. If we're in student government, we dream about holding a high office. If we have a boyfriend or girlfriend, we spend plenty of time imagining how we're going to grow up, get married, and have kids. The dreams may be impractical, but that hardly matters. We dream them anyway.
Life after high school rarely bears much resemblance to the plans we made in our teens. We soon discover that life is more about great obstacles than it is about great expectations. We find that our high school sweetheart, sweet as he or she may be, is just one fish in a sea full of fish. Unpredictable events change our direction dramatically, which is sometimes to our benefit and sometimes to our detriment, but which rarely takes us on the course we envisioned. We change our ambitions and our tactics as we stop imagining the life we will lead and start to live the life we're given.
As teenagers, we were vibrantly and awkwardly alive. It was a glorious time in its way, but as we grow up we set aside the parts of ourselves that don't fit in the real world. We become less naive. Our grand illusions break off and fall away. The people we are during our teen years are unique versions of ourselves, like uncooked pies, full of potential and yet incomplete.
But our high school yearbooks capture that time - the friends we had, the objectives we worked so hard toward, the niche we found for ourselves when we were at our most insecure. The value of those volumes is that they provide a portal to the past. We can go back any time we want. We can go back and remember.
I'm a teacher with a passion for writing about high school yearbook pictures.
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