Nervous to Leave the Nest: Reverse Senioritis

Ramir Wearen

Those final days leading up to graduation for high school seniors are the most anticipated days leading up to June 23rd, 2022. As much as seniors may begin to feel a slew of emotions - excitement for college, adulthood or the transition into the real world, where there’s nothing but space and opportunity. But not everyone has the same experiences.

Am I experiencing reverse- senioritis? I asked myself the same thing back in January, when I first felt this alien feeling. I felt a sudden sense of dejection, and it had dawned on me: I’m just a few months from entering adulthood, a few months from making a decision that would completely change my life forever, determining my life path, choosing to further my education, relocation, career choice. There is  just so much I knew I had to do and it’s even harder to have to think about it all at once. As the 2nd marking period approached, the countdown began. 

As seniors, if you take the necessary courses prior, your senior year will get shorter and schedules will change. You're able to drop classes that you feel aren’t beneficial to you and most of us will only be in school for half of the day, morning or afternoon. Walking through the halls as a senior you won’t see all of those you saw years before as often; everyone is grown up, pursuing things in life or trying to find their life path. It almost feels empty: you’re surrounded by students younger than you, seniors are able to leave for lunch therefore there is no more seating at lunchroom tables, lunch with friends in teachers' classrooms or libraries. You begin to reminisce and wish you hadn’t taken those small memories for granted, like pep rallies, after school clubs and extracurricular activities. Now you have no time for anything, you have no time to relax, fool around, procrastinate every minute counts.

I call this reverse senoritis, which I discovered is an actual thing.  

I think that people naturally begin to check out when they know the ending of something is near. You have those who accept it and are willing to move on from things if they're negative and then you have those who become regretful and begin to wonder how things would be if they’d done things differently whether the outcome is good or bad. As much as I think graduating would be another milestone I could add to my life accomplishments, it's also very difficult to think about a very long--almost decade and a half--system and cycle I’m used to will soon break and I will begin to transition into adulthood.