18 Aug 2016

It’s not weird to feel devo about leaving high school behind. It’s not weird at all. Only a window-licker would be sentimental about the end of biology classes and fugly uniforms but high school is more than just those things. High school is your friends, and the life-shaping experiences you’ve had together. High school is your first real crush, your school netball and footy teams, and your swimming carnival house. High school is the teachers you’ve grown to half-like, and the excursions you go on. High school is pupil free days; it’s dackings, dares, dances and drama.

It’s not just time inside the school gates but that whole phase of life that’s pretty sweet. There’s the short days, the lack of many responsibilities, and the holiday periods that have working adults seething with jealousy. There’s the after school arvos spent mucking around at the park, or the pool, or mates’ houses. You’d have to be colder than a north-of-the-wall winter to not feel a bit regretful about moving on.

Maybe you aren’t bothered because you reckon you’ll keep in touch with everyone after graduation night. Maybe you think that nothing will break up you and your Wolfpack, you’re too tight—you’ll still party together, laugh together, go through life together. And possibly you will, but more often life gets in the way.

People leave school and drift away, for uni or for work, and they meet new friends, and hang at new places. That’s normal, but it’s also normal to get a bit sentimental about leaving what you know behind. Your friends are everything to you, and you’re happy doing your familiar things at your familiar hang-outs. You don’t want it all to end forever. But what can you do? You can’t stop time.

You can, however, stay in touch with those people who loomed large in your high school life. That might seem obvious, but as easy as social media has made doing it, what’s not as obvious is that contact with your besties—actual face-to-face contact like your whisperings in Maths and hi-jinks on weekends—will fade to black unless you do something specific about maintaining it.

You might be away at uni, having promised yourself you’ll stay close to your friends for life, and thinking that Yeah of course I’ll head back to the hometown to catch up with Larissa and Steve…probably next month.

Next month you have no money though—you spent it all at the uni bar, and on 2 minute noodles—so you can’t make it. The month after, there’s a few unmissable parties in a row on campus, the month after that, you forget, the month after that…you get the idea. Before long it’s months, years, since you’ve seen each other, and what you promised yourself wouldn’t happen has, without you meaning it to.

So you need to actually lock something in. Plan a golf day, a barbecue, a visit to the footy or a concert. It can be just a coffee date or a brew, but book it in, pay for whatever has to be paid for, and make the effort to go. Otherwise you might never do it.

Another thing you can do is make something that captures the best of your high school years—some simple yet tangible thing that symbolises that time in your life. It could be a photo album, or a scrapbook. It could be some muck-around video tribute you make with classmates, it could be a song you write. It could be anything, but so long as it’s something you can look at or feel occasionally, it will give you something representing the past to hold on to. It will lock in your memories.

You could also open a link between your old life and your new. Give something back to your school: offer to give a talk to students there about what you’re studying, or what job you’ve landed since graduating. Maybe you could tap out an article for your old school’s rag or newsletter, or start saving to open a gym or shop in your past stomping ground.

It might sound like something from a Dr Phil life-lesson, but this will help you get on with building and advancing your future life, while sustaining a link to your past. (And get ready for Dr Phil life-lessons and other daytime TV anyway if you’re uni-bound).

Your high school years will live on in your memory. No-one can take away from you the friends you had and the experiences you went through. But if you’re finding it hard to move on from them, do something about it. It will give you the reassurance to move on and embrace the next phase in your life. Then make some more memories.