"I am always thinking 'What am I doing here? Is this the way I am supposed to feel?'" - Jack Kerouac

I'm always thinking this. I always feel like I am not feeling enough of something, that I am not taking advantage of the situation for all it's worth. It's almost as if you're worried that you are not as happy or sad as you should be. My last day of high school was in a word, anticlimactic. I wasn't severely happy nor was tear stained depressed. The indifference of it all made it seem unreal, like I was a spectator watching someone else's life.

" I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television – you don’t feel anything."

This little insight from Andy Warhol encompasses how I often feel at those rising moments, at how I felt today. Maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet, maybe the surreality of it all is causing the numbness. When I was looking around the field I felt I was watching a teen movie with cheesy dialogue and actors that couldn't quite deliver the ending. All throughout high school I was plagued by an inadequacy. A feeling that something about me just wasn't enough for the environment, that my inability to saturate into all the colors made me perpetually a couple of steps behind. And to me this is what high school has always been defined as, a wait of some sort. Yet it is not the type of wait where you are resting but the type where you are running, where you are trying to catch up to some point of complete saturation encased in ambiguity.

I cannot lie and say the cliched line of "I had a horrible time in high school." Because a select group of people I have met have made it all the worth while. Through them I have gained a confidence and a self possession that you really can only obtain from your peers. And though them I have felt as if I have asserted and solidified my character into something that wasn't so familiar and comforting as family. I have spent 13 years at this school and there's no denying the fact that the people and the school always will be a large and news 12 spotted part of my youth. But I'm tired of running in the wait. These past years I will keep in my body like an appendix, something I once needed but have evolutionary outgrown. I guess it's fitting that today was anticlimactic because after a climax everything goes downhill, and well, I'm kind of looking up from here.