Senior Anthology

A collection of thoughts from some of our editors in the senior class of 2021. A year of too much disease, screen time, and inner brooding. What a year.

1. by LINA JAAFAR

Phase I: Insecurity

“Lina, one day you will plant a luscious fig tree just like your friends, and your tree will grow taller, stronger, more fruitful than theirs.”

I like the idea of gardening. It is easy to imagine myself in a flowing white sundress frolicking through a green paradise, the sun flickering off of plants growing in every nook. It is easy to see myself having a great, dandy time in the Elysian fields. 

But once the glow fades, once the glitter rubs off and falls to the ground, the idea of gardening horrifies me. The longer I look down, the more movement I can see in the soil. Overrun by termites, spiders crawling onto and back off my shoes—my heart begins to beat faster and faster.

My sleeves fall naturally over my knuckles, concealing my wrists. I have to pull them over my elbows to keep them clean. The hems of my jeans drape loosely around my legs and drag through the dirt. I should’ve cuffed them once more, but I am eager to get the job done and plant the seeds I think I want to plant. Perhaps I only want to plant the seeds because my parents told me I should, but I convince myself I am more free-thinking than that. 

A single seed buried in the palm of my hand, I sprint across to the corner of the garden. With my fingertips, I dig a hole and place the seed in the soil, hoping a lush fig tree, stronger and more fruitful than my friends’ trees, will see the light of day.

Phase II: Doubt

The soil feels drier than it should. My teta was the last to tend to the garden, but she passed away months ago. Dead trees and brown leaves, the state of the garden was desolate from the abandonment. I doubt the tree will grow. 

Somewhere deep down, I don’t know if I want it to. I would much rather be with my friends.

Phase III: Comparison

I drag my hand along the chalky wall of the garden, picking sweet fruit from the neighbors’ tree. After all, her tree had grown into my land, over the barriers, intertwining with branches of my own. If I climb high enough and wrap my fingers around a thick branch, I can just barely see over the wall. My neighbor’s garden is greener than mine, and her figs taste much sweeter on my tongue.

I hate her.

Phase IV: Bitterness

“She has cleaner water, better soil, healthier seeds, more time! If I had what she had, no doubt my figs would be plumper, sweeter, better.”

Phase V: Self-destruction

Today I committed arson.

It starts with me setting fire to a single dried leaf from the garden floor. I don’t mean to start a fire. I just want to watch the leaf burn, then wither away. The smell of the fire brings a level of peace and calm to my mind that I’ve never experienced before. The sound of the match striking the side of the box, the sound of the fire crackling the leaf away as I hold it steady.

I light another leaf. Then another, and another, and again another. I walk slowly to the edge of my garden. I pluck a single leaf off my fig tree and set it ablaze. The smell of smoke fills the air. Mesmerized by the sensory experience, I don’t notice the flame making its way down to my fingers. I drop the leaf, and suddenly the ground erupts in a violent pool of lava.

I stand powerless amidst the flames. As the heat climbs up my body, engulfing my soul, I realize what I have done, I pledge never to do it again: never to plant a seed I don’t want to plant, never to hate someone for doing a better job, hurting myself and others in the process. Envy, I realize, is a dangerous spark with the power to reduce all progress to rubble. 

Phase VI: Rebirth

The flames die down and I sit petrified in the middle of the garden. The scene is like a snapshot in time. Chestnut hair blowing in the wind, body covered in ashes. I turn my face to the sun peering at me from behind a break in the muddy clouds. 

I have no doubt that I will mess up again—that more fields will be burnt down, that I will lose faith time after time after time, only to regain it once I’ve hit rock bottom. It’s already happened multiple times in my first few years of life. Bitter existentialism, conversations about what anything, let alone everything, means—they’ve all made their homes as part of life. And while I am eager to find my purpose, and while I rush a future upon myself at the young and dumb age of seventeen, there will always be enough time to start over.

Though my hands are scarred and my body aches, I will continue to pour my energy into various trees throughout my life. I will carry with me the memory of this disaster till the end.

2. by JOCELYN HSIEH

At my desk for the fourth consecutive hour, all I can think is that all paths lead to here. Every success and heartbreak would still lead to me being here, at my desk, in this state of mind (probably for the rest of this year). I should have done more while I could.

In the past year, my sense of productivity has also become incredibly skewed. In past years, I remember studying and finishing my homework quickly so that I could go play frisbee every day, without fear that rushing through rendered me less productive. Stuck at home, with all the time in the world, I’ll find a million things to do before I sit down again, my back aching, to do something “productive.” I rarely find my work rewarding, only really feeling the panic of having to keep my grades up. It’s the same panic as that of my past three years but now turned up to 150% because I have little else to care about. 

Nonetheless, I feel somewhat fortunate for the circumstances of my senior year, even if I resent that I’ve been robbed of my senior slump experience. I’m hopeful that the lessons I’ve learned will lead me to more success—mental stability, friends, and happiness—in college and beyond. For now, I’ll reminisce about the good moments from these past few years.

When I was a freshman, I heard from countless seniors that high school goes by fast. In the thick of it, I couldn’t have disagreed more. Every biology test, winter season, and orchestra rehearsal felt like forever. There was a rhythm to my life that I found in sophomore year—one that continued into the beginning of junior year. It was comfortable, and in those moments, I was glad that high school was slow. Thinking back to my high school career, I can’t really remember any specific horrible moment. Instead, I just remember the rhythmic comfort of day-to-day drudgery. The good moments were beautiful, but they were also brief and sprinkled on, in the form of lunches in commons II, frisbee practices, and frozen yogurt with my friends. The brevity of these little moments was what made high school feel so fast. 

They’re also what I miss most. At the end of junior year, I thought that what I was missing was the big events, like prom, graduation, and the all-night grad party. What I’ve instead realized is that I don’t really care about those things. I would much rather have one more lunch in the quad, or one more snack session at Cary. Now, I’m disconnected from people that I once spoke to daily. I feel like we’ve all drifted, without the chance to say goodbye as we would have in a normal year. 

There’s a familiar adage that goes something like, “life is short, live it to the fullest.” Or, “live every day like your last.” Or, “carpe diem.” From freshman through junior year, I put off a lot of experiences, expecting to live them out in senior year. Whether it was joining indoor track, attending that one tournament in DC, or even hanging out over the weekend, I reasoned that I’d have the time to do it in senior year. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. Going forward, I want to carve out the time for the things I want to do. Life isn’t about how well you hit academia’s targets of success. It’s about how much satisfaction you find in your life. 

Like all good things, you have to make the time to find it.

3. by IAN CARSON

Every so often at 4:00 in the morning, I wake up and can’t go back to sleep. Sometimes I turn on a light and read something. Sometimes I even manage to walk downstairs and get work done. But almost always, I toss and turn in a dark room and I worry—about grades, about people, and about how I could’ve worked harder and done more.

That, more than anything, is the sensation I’m remembering the most now as I consider what the past four years have been. It was my reality as a freshman and it still is now. Even during a pandemic and despite the anxiety, stress, and fear that came with it, the culture at this school still tells us there isn’t time to let up. If you’re not the best, if you’re not doing it all, then you’re not working hard enough. For years, as what I now suspect was a coping mechanism, I looked away and pretended that pressure didn’t exist. Jocelyn’s advice was to carve out time for the things we want to do. Mine is to confront the reality of our environment because if we as students want to improve this school, we must start by acknowledging we have a problem. 

This culture does more than just cause stress. Every day feels like a capitulation to the pressure to participate in more clubs and study for more tests and spend more time grinding away at work. Eventually, the only way to reckon with that is to defer your real aspirations and dreams to the next year. And the next, and the next. And now, I’ve run out of them. There will be no year of LHS after this one. When I feel a sense of unfinished business with high school, I can only blame so much on the pandemic. This is a feeling four years in the making.

What if I knew that deferral was a choice before I reached the end? 

I’m not sure, but I wonder whether it would have mitigated the acute sense of grief I feel now, with 9 weeks left. A lot of the joy in high school has come from what was described to me years ago as the “gritty minutiae” of high school life, but I can’t help but believe I could have been happier and more content—the good memories coming from something lasting rather than periodically like kibble out of an automatic food dispenser.

Maybe it’s silly to break life into finite chunks like this, because in a lot of ways the stuff that really matters—the people we spend time with and the experiences that change us—don't follow those divisions. But beyond high school, buying into a culture of achievement is always a choice we’re going to be presented with. Rarely will the answer be to turn it down entirely, but maybe the lesson is to at least recognize it is one I’m making, because if I had that foresight four years ago, I think I’d be ending my time here with less ambivalence.

4. by ATHENA LI

For most of my life, I’ve been itching to be somewhere else. Be someone else. And most importantly, to be able to start anew.

I believe part of it is from having watched way too many coming-of-age movies, starting from the impressionable age of thirteen. Before high school, I saw every Perks of Being a Wallflower-esque film I could get my hands on. Dead Poets Society. The Breakfast Club. 10 Things I Hate About You. You name it, I’ve seen it. 

I desperately yearned for an adolescence with as much beauty, joy, melodrama, and perhaps even sadness as these characters each experienced within the hour and forty-five minutes they were on my laptop screen. I longed for beauty, aesthetics, and color to fill my life, which in reality was possessed by the banality of routine and expectations.

Lexington has an academically rigorous culture, and a common pre-COVID phrase to hear amongst some of its more academically intense students was “I’ll wait until senior year to have fun.” “I’ll wait until after I finish my SATs to get my license, to take a day off, to go on this trip.” Honestly, as someone who hates spending time at home, I quickly became frustrated with this sort of talk. Still, for the most part, I stuck it out for the sake of my friends who truly believed in this notion.

Nowadays, I don’t know if I should feel vindictive or depressed at how wrong that “all work and no play” rhetoric has proven to be. I can’t help but possess this selfish, unsoothable envy at the world for taking away that magical teenage experience I was supposed to have. On the other hand, I know that even without coronavirus, that mentality would have likely impacted me in a very similar way.

It’s a first-world problem. Like many problems relating to boredom, it's one that stems from a position of privilege—the privilege to not be constantly burdened with some greater problem to worry about. At the same time, I believe that neglecting this complicated emotion (one that people on the Internet may call FOMO) is detrimental to discussing the deeper problem at hand. Why do I, as an 18-year-old, already feel like I’ve wasted my life? Why do I feel as if the good years (which for me, weren’t so great) have already come and gone? I’m trying to shake that belief, but as adulthood and responsibility stare me right in the eye, I can’t help but be intimidated by both my future and my past.

Nevertheless, time stops for no one. In just a few short months, I’ll be graduating and attending yet another institution. 

I can remain bitter. I can continue thinking about the past. But I don’t know if that is a viable choice anymore. 

After all, it is a time to be optimistic. I finally have an opportunity to be somewhere else, be someone else, and start anew. Changes are coming soon. It’s time to let go—and welcome the future with open arms.

5. by JOY GONG

“I am proud of you.”

I have seldom heard those five words throughout the past four years. In the most brittle of states, I often felt like a lifeless soul whose body was minutes away from collapsing into a bare carcass, an overworked and overused animal with no more drive. Aimlessly, I denied myself a life I could’ve at least tolerated, falling into an inescapable cycle of “no food—no drink—no sleep.” Instead of cracking my door open to let people in, I chose to suffocate alone. 

I wish someone could have knocked on that door, gently patting my head, draping a blanket over my shoulders, or pulling me into a hug. If there had been even a single person to ask me if I was okay, or validated all the effort I put in without purpose, perhaps I would’ve felt a little less lonely. 

The education system shapes us to be perfect, beautiful glass sculptures — those with stripes of sapphire and gold you’d silently envy, eyes pressed against the glass window of the museum, carefully observing the glassblowers’ every move. My whole life, I have heated and reheated that glass to meticulously refine my life, trying to make it more perfect. More accomplished. I was always lacking something.  

We are beautiful but brittle. The fragile glass shatters easily, and we beat ourselves up for receiving that bad grade, for quitting something we didn’t have time for, for losing a friend because we kept comparing ourselves to them. And we must restart — regain the motivation we thought we once had. 

I have always blamed the glass-sculpture assembly line for my troubles. It’s my incompetent teacher’s fault that I hate school. My friend literally cannot keep her mouth closed about getting into college. The coach is a f***ing racist. Why can’t my own father respect my decisions? I blamed them for my unhappiness — outside interactions beyond my control. It wasn’t until the end of junior year that I realized: the depression stemmed from inside me. 

What if I chose clay, instead of glass? Moldable and forgiving, I could have built a Joy who was more resilient, a teenager who saw the big picture of life after high school, an artist who wasn’t overwhelmed in details. I could have opened the doors and done what I truly wanted. After an American Lit class that implored us to critically reflect on our present and future lives, I ultimately picked up that clay and started to knead. 

Occasionally, I wonder what it would have been like if I chose to withstand such a close-minded and narrow worldview, one based off of the perceived “success” of my high school years. What if I’d stuck with Math Team and qualified for the USAMO that I’d always dreamed of? Or never started track and focused all my attention on academic achievement? Or postponed the French Exchange until my senior year to focus, junior year, on blossoming into a robot my father was proud of? 

I am thankful that I didn’t continue on that path—yet I am simultaneously grateful for the bitterness with which my original path has familiarized me. I would not change the past four years, during which I’ve graciously learned about the Silk Roads of Eurasia, the spiritual crisis of Franny and Zooey, and the rotational inertia of a falling chimney—but perhaps the most about myself. 

In retrospect, I now realize that I never needed someone to tell me they were proud of me. I needed to be able to tell myself that first.

Thank you, LHS. And Joy, I’m proud of you.