An open letter to high school graduates. Fortunately, your story is just getting started.

Originally appeared on Medium.com

Graduation from high school was one of the most uneventful experiences of my life.

Believe it or not, high school is not wonderful, meaningful, or beneficial for all who walk those troubled halls.

I imagine there are some who in 2020 when they were told in-person schooling was done for the foreseeable future due to COVID, celebrated. Believe it or not, there are high schoolers who wake up and battle whether they should go to school or commit suicide. As parents and popular kids mourned the loss of prom, sporting events, and the magical experiences of high school — other kids felt like they were given a pass from a life and world they dreaded every moment of.

In some ways, such a sentiment feels inappropriate. Graduating high school is something to be proud of. It’s an accomplishment; a feat of spectacular endurance and capability.

Graduating high school also just feels a bit mundane, if not dreadful.

Which is how high school felt for me.

I’ve come to find out that such an experience is not that far-fetched. Actually, the experience that high school is a shallow, banal, unglamorous servitude designed for a very specific group of people but enforced on everyone is more common than I realized.

I remember sitting through my high school graduation feeling like I was sitting at a railroad track watching an impossibly long train go by — it was an unfortunate detour to what could have been a beautiful summer night.

The only real celebration was that I didn’t have to do it anymore.

When I left, I did not yet understand how minimal the experience of high school was; nor did I recognize that the majority of my life would be so independent of those four years of life.

Maybe you are in the same place when I was 18-years-old.

Here’s what I wish someone would have told me:

Good News — You’re Just Getting Started

It’s the only thing you know — glorified sporting events, achievement-oriented metrics of success, glamorized personality traits, microcosmic power differentials, generalized cliques, and cultural norms and categories you’re supposed to fit into.

It may be difficult, therefore, to have a proper sense of proportion of just how small these past four years will one day become.

You’ve endured.

You made it.

Yet, one day, these past four years will be a tiny blip on the radar of your life.

See, you’ve been told that those who achieved, those who made it, those who were on top, and those who checked off the most culturally accepted boxes will always be there. You’ve been made to think that how the world is on the last day of school will always be how it is.

Not only is this not true, but those roles will also barely last through the summer.

Therefore, I beg you to hear this good news:

You’re just getting started.

High school does not define who you are nor what your life will be like. In fact, I’d like to think that people like us are the ones who played the long game. The supposedly cool kids — they just peaked early. Because it’s possible that the version of success we buy into as teenagers has very little to do with success.

Listen, those achievements? They don’t really matter.

The awards and scholarships? They don’t determine joy or talent or meaning or value.

The limelight that hovered over a few specific kids? It isn’t nearly as bright as you may think.

Don’t forget to consider that the acknowledgments of high school rarely cover the vast possibilities of the world. In fact, the acknowledgments of high school — come to find out — tend to go to the people who know how to jump through the hoops and who fit the predetermined categories of what is socially acceptable.

Maybe the greatest compliment a high schooler can receive is that there is no metric, scholarship, achievement, award, or category to contain your possibility. Sometimes, not fitting in is simply a sign that the small world of high school politics cannot hold the big, beautiful world that you are capable of unleashing.

I know you may have been told that you don’t belong.

I know you may have felt that there must be something wrong with you.

I know that you were made to believe you were behind.

I know you might not feel celebrated, accomplished, honored, cared for, important, successful, or valuable.

Please remember, however, that these four years might describe your experience, but they do not define your future.

How it was is not how it will be.

Rarely does the reality of high school make it past those doors.

You are still a teenager. You haven’t even begun your story. That was the prelude. You’ve finished the introduction.

Now the story begins.

In fact, now that the confines of an educational system that never sought to account for your gift are finished…

…it’s time for your gift to truly emerge.

Because, my friend, you’ve only just begun.

One day, I hope you will look back and see how minimally important these years were. Don’t believe the lie that your story has been determined; because it hasn’t.

You are set to traverse unimagined terrain.

Embrace the immensity of the possible, not the clamoring nightmare of the past.

No one from high school gets to decide who you are, what you’ll do, who you’ll be, what you will create, how you will change things, or what you are capable of.

No one from high school gets to decide if you’re worth it.

No one from high school gets to shape your identity.

And no one from high school gets to influence your life or how the world will perceive you.

That experience holds zero power over you.

So consider your graduation a feat worth celebrating. It’s over. Against all odds and against all of the misplaced values of high school culture, you made it.

Now go.

Begin the life that high school never was capable of offering someone like you.

And know that these four short years are on their way to becoming four very short years of history and nothing more.