Safety Net

Congratulations. You have made it. You have complete 13 maybe 14 years. 13 maybe 14 years of working your way up through the system ensuring your grades were above 60%. You have completed 13 maybe 14 years ensuring you made the right friends, because at the end of the day most of them would end up in the same place as you. The same primary, middle, and high school. These people end up spending the same 13 maybe 14 years with you.
And what does it all amount to? What do these important 13 maybe 14 years add up to the makes it so important to be so perfect.
I spent these years ensuring I was the ideal student, getting the ideal marks and so on and so on.
Yet like so many others I am about to leave all of this behind.
I understand that these 13, 14 years are your building blocks to the next maybe 7 or 8 years in this magical place called post-secondary, but why did we all stress over these "building blocks"?
I can think of all the breakdowns and unhappy breaks I have experienced due to the emphasis of becoming the ideal student.
This is the fatal flaw of public education. They teach you to become what they are. You notice at every single board office you go to in each region has a mission statement. It usually has something to do with promoting personal excellence and striving for greatness... blah blah blah. Then you look at all of the schools under this regional education board, and their mission statements are almost identical.
I have yet to go to a school where they promote originality, and striving to create your own self the way you need to do it.
For some kids creating themselves and becoming who they includes, getting 50% in almost everything and never coming to class. Why? Because I find with kids, adults, teens, the elderly... everyone, they need to make mistakes and bad decisions. Sometimes these bad decisions last longer than others and it takes years, and years for them to get out of the habit. Other times these people never get out of these habits and continue to do them even after regional board education.
However I firmly believe that it is in the power of no one else except for the individual to discontinue these habits. When people coddle over people who never go to class, or never hand in assignments, or people who always miss class to go smoke or come to class stoned, will never improve of stray away from the habit. Why? Because usually people adopt these habits for attention. It usually follows a path. Like a kid in primary school; they usually find it difficult to share and listen to lessons, which results in the inability to learn and do well, then in middle school they become the kid that wanders around the halls, taking 30 minute washroom breaks, and sleeps in the back of class, then in high school they become part-time students and usually show up at school when they aren't supposed to be there. However this pattern usually discontinues after public education. Why? Because they either drop out of the schooling system completely or they finally realize they have screwed up.
This is because public education is the biggest support system any child will ever get. The teachers hold your hand, and you are living under your parents house, food and money. However, when public education ends every graduate is thrown into the deep end, having to learn how to be independent support for themselves, and ensure they will have a future. This is why kids change, because no one is codling them, they are finally left alone, and they realize how much of a dark, scary, and hard working world they truly live in.
So here I am now. Accepting this soft and tender diploma that says I successfully held every administrators, teachers, and staffs hand as tightly as I could. And have become the ideal student they always wanted. I will gracefully accept the diploma, while my frail hands shake, and tears full of fear and ambiguity fall down my cheeks.
Post-Secondary has been my dream. I have been waiting for this moment. However, the anxiety, fear, and ill feeling that comes with it, almost seems endless. Friends and family wonder why I am so full of emotion this year. I have always wondered why graduates cry so much.
It's not so much that they are sad to leave a wonderful group of people behind. It's more so they are leaving the biggest safety net of their lives behind.
Next year, I am on my own. I have to study, eat, sleep, socialize, and focus all on my own. I am scared. In fact, fear is not even a word to describe what I feel. Fear is just a bi-product of how I feel. Fear implies I know exactly what scares me. In this situation I don't. I don't know what to expect, and I don't know how to combat this.
So far the only thing that comes to mind is to go. Is to go and spend the next couple of years taking everything in strides. I know I will fall down... a lot, but now I have to learn how to get up, brush myself off, and catch up.


Originally Patience








If anyone is going into post-secondary this fall for the first time, I understand, and you're not alone.