I will never be more than what I am not. If you were to ask me who I am, I would only wish to be able to answer you. In reality, I would have probably Googled a word and told you the first one I resonated with. I think the dumbest mistake of mine was to let myself be defined. I have realized there is not one thing unique about me, but this is rather heartwarming to me now. I was able to discover the things I am and am not through the people and life I lived while in high school. For this reason I have grown to love every moment of it. 

14 to 18, freshman to senior, I feel like I have lived a very long time in what is actually not long at all. Four years is nothing in the long run. Heck, I’ve lived to the age of 4, four and a half times. But this time has taught me more about myself than anything else has. My jealousy of others has turned into admiration, loneliness into independence and insecurity into curiosity. I’m no better than anyone else. I actually feel the opposite at times because it was the people and environment around me that showed me these things about myself.

 I loved freshman year biology because it showed me some of the funniest people at this school. I strained a muscle in my chest that year from laughing so hard. I loved when I had a bedtime of 10:30 p.m. because I would actually get enough sleep in a day. I loved when I was an underclassman because I always had people to look up to. You can find love in all sorts of places once you start looking for it. 

I was reading through a previous journal I filled around my freshman year when I found the statement, “love the mundane, love the restless” bolded on a single page. Since then I have promised myself to live by those very words. This statement gains a sense of sobriety  and urgency due to graduation coming up this very week. I close my eyes and hug my friends tighter now. I began saying I love you more often to my friends and family. I have grown to be so extremely grateful for a place such as high school that was able to kindle and foster the unemployed, shy, TikTok-addicted Lea into a now-employed, stronger and still TikTok-addicted version of myself. 

It seriously feels like this school was a house to me due to the time I’ve spent in it, and the people inside made it a temporary home. Mr. Jukkala’s class was a bedroom to me as I would take the best naps during the Ken Burns documentaries we’d watch. The newspaper room became a living room after hours during newspaper paste up as we’d all devour Costco pizza and brownies together while stressed to get our work done. Ms. Lacy was the mother that affirmed us but also kept us in check with strict deadlines. Mooney’s junior year IB Literature class tore me to shreds. It was rather fitting that we read Dante’s Inferno that year because the class itself felt like the inferno at times. But Mooney and the other students in that class were my Virgil. Dare I say Mooney was our Gatsby with the banquet he threw us at the end of the year. 

It has been a home through every failed test, every happy and sad cry, every single teacher good and bad and every single day’s hiccups and highs that I will miss in a few years. The mundane Mondays with nothing new happening will soon turn into midterm weeks and laundry days, and the restless football Fridays will turn into homesick days missing my room while stuck at my dorm. 

There was a disillusionment with my old ideas of love. I searched for a picnic at sunset, a kiss in the rain, these overdone, superficial actions of love that only come once in a romantic comedy. What I ended up finding love to truly be was crying in my mother’s arms, making horrible jokes with friends and not feeling embarrassed about it and asking someone if they’re there and they always respond with, “I’m here.” Actions such as these have taught me to love the mundane and the restless, to love it all.