When you’re at high school, the littlest things can feel like a pretty big deal. Missing a deadline or an invite to a party, getting a humongous pimple on the night of the school social, or when your Dove “summer glow” turns out a shade more akin to nuclear radiation.
But when you’re at an all-girls Catholic high school, these little things feel like the end of the world. Full-blown Armageddon. How can you ever come back from that time you called your teacher mum? Or the time you forgot to shave your bikini line before swimming sports day? You can’t – and you’re probably also going straight to hell. What for? Who knows! That’s the beauty of Catholic guilt! (an entirely new phenomenon for me, having grown up Orthodox).
Enter my (actual) mum, with her words of wisdom: “You don’t want to peak at high school.”
I would have been 13 when she first said it and I recall thinking the woman wasn’t well. Of course you want to peak at high school! You want to be the hottest girl in the class, you want to be friends with everyone, funny, down to earth, smart – but not in a way that is intimidating – and really good at netball. You basically want to be an all-Australian Serena van der Woodsen, complete with the slept-in beachy waves and a very loose interpretation of a school uniform.
By this logic, every year of high school would be better than the last until you eventually peak in year 12 – ideally at formal, arm in arm with Edward Cullen. This is probably a good time to note that just writing this is making me cringe at 13-year-old me.
Every time I had a meltdown – of which there were many – Mum would repeat her advice. Sometimes it was accompanied by “none of this is going to mean anything to you in 10 years’ time” or “you will laugh at this one day”. The poor woman had absolutely lost the plot.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment her words clicked for me, but they had by the time I actually got to year 12. Maybe it was because my reality of my final year at high school was so removed from what 13-year-old me thought it would be, or because the later seasons of Gossip Girl proved her point (Serena peaked at high school and her storyline became incredibly boring from there on). Also, just logically, my life hadn’t peaked yet because I hadn’t met Robert Pattinson and I knew when I did he would instantly fall in love with me (sadly, we are now both happily engaged to other people).
I think what Mum was trying to say was that there’s no fun in having everything sorted out at high school. It’s a mess – but it’s meant to be. Your skin will clear up, you will find your people, and your grades – while they can be helpful to get you to where you want to go quicker – don’t mean much once you start working. Once you’re out of high school, you will get to travel, you will see the world and you will realise just how small you are in it. But that’s a good thing. Those little-but-huge things become little things. They really do mean nothing in 10 years’ time and you really do laugh about them. Just recently, I caught up with my two remaining friends from high school and we laughed so hard we had tears rolling down our faces. While most friendships from high school won’t last, the ones that do get even better.
In all, those six, hormone-fuelled years of high school are just a stepping stone to the rest of your life. The start of it, really. If you peak at that point, if your best moments are at high school, how can you go forward? Now I’m cringing at 28-year-old me.
Mum’s advice still guides me when things are tough, albeit in a different way. I am no mountain climber, so apologies if I mangle the analogy, but I no longer look at life as a constant hike up to a certain point at which I have “made it”. There’s no summit. Rather, there are a series of peaks, plummets and plateaux. Things go great, then they don’t and sometimes it’s all just a bit meh. Mum’s advice now serves to remind me that there are always better days ahead.
