As I passed my tassel from right to left with the Boerne High School Class of 2022, I felt the breath of the past four years shared with my classmates brush through us with the slight evening wind. It was then that our adolescence ended as quickly as it had brought itself on. Fearfully, I recalled the many who had told me that high school would be the best years of my life, and with hope, I realized they wouldn’t be.
My high school days were spent with eyes on the future. At Boerne High, academic competition is high, and while I was blessed to be in this environment where education was so genuinely cultivated, the stress of achievement eroded my teenage years. With clubs, extracurriculars, AP classes, dual credit classes and even the social pressure to belong in this community of excellence, I forgot what it was to be young all whilst, paradoxically, in the midst of my own youth.
For Boerne graduates, our shared memories include Friday night stadium lights, pep rallies and some very notable morning announcements. We also were collectively influenced by the effects of COVID-19. During the time of our lives where we were meant to be most social, we were isolated. With many classmates learning remotely for almost half of our high school careers, the Class of 2022 was inevitably less united by the good times in our hometown and more so divided by the calamitous era we came of age in.
Perhaps because times were so uncertain, the future became my focus for almost all of high school. SAT and ACT prep courses, academic competitions, college-prep, college applications and scholarship applications became my entire life. Like many of my classmates, I worked almost ceaselessly from freshman to senior year, eyes set solely on what my life would be after walking that pedestalled stage. Many who told us that these were the best years of our lives underestimated the massive weight of being a teenager in 2022.
And so, when I graduated on May 27, the football field where I did spend some of my fleeting carefree high school memories became a field of freedom. I was finally free from the constant competition with my class to be ranked highly, to be admitted to the best school, to be the best student by marks of achievement.
I also realized, following graduation, that regardless of what class rank each of us had attained or what our plans were for higher education, each of us had a life to navigate that was sure to be equally complex and equally challenging. My efforts were not in vain, and I am exceedingly grateful to have been able to attain a full-ride scholarship to the college of my choice. But I am also aware, now, that an alternate outcome would be just as nervously exciting.
With my fellow graduates, I stand at a pivotal point in my life, and there are many paths to choose. I am inspired by the words of my best friend, Brea Hines, who would have walked the stage before me that night if not for an unfair battle with childhood cancer.
“Gentle the butterfly flew over the lake with her gentle wings,” Brea wrote at an exceedingly young age. “She flew through the fog and over the gates. The thick wind in between her songs made it hard for her to fly, but she kept flying down the path she chose. The path she chose, many did not choose.”
I have said that my adolescence was spent less youthfully than I would have advised my freshman self. However, there were certainly moments where I set aside my woes about the future and was able to live in this “golden” age. I was grateful to have the words of Brea to live by, for they reminded me that I was living what others only dreamed of and wished for. Brea’s family would have given anything, I know, for her to experience the same silly high school drama, football games and awkward dances that I often brushed off as pale in comparison to the world I sought after graduation.
Yet, with these pleasant high school memories behind me, and armored with the lessons I learned in living more presently, I am gratefully prepared to take on what is next. As I passed my tassel from right to left with the kids who I have grown up with, I felt the thrill of all the people I would meet beyond the borders of this so-called Boerne Bubble.
And while there are facets of this town and of those BHS halls that I know change-makers will tackle in my absence, I love this place for the hindsight and foresight it granted me. With the Class of 2022, I thank our high school experience wholeheartedly, but at the same time, I thank our futures for what they might bring.
Tenley Jackson was The Boerne Star’s student intern during the 2021-22 academic year.
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