{"id":7593,"date":"2016-04-18T23:45:18","date_gmt":"2016-04-19T03:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=7593"},"modified":"2016-04-19T02:25:10","modified_gmt":"2016-04-19T06:25:10","slug":"goodbyes-friendships-and-closure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2016\/04\/18\/goodbyes-friendships-and-closure\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbyes, Friendships, and Closure"},"content":{"rendered":"

For my final blog post of the year, I wasn\u2019t sure what to write about. Girls<\/em> aired an amazing two-part finale to a great fifth season last night, so I could write about that, a sort of check-in since my last post about it. I could write about the finales of Better Call Saul<\/em> or Shameless<\/em>, or the second Story Slam I went to, or any other arts-related thing I\u2019ve been to on campus.<\/p>\n

But I most want to write about goodbyes, and friendship, and closure, and the high school I went to that\u2019s closing in 2019.<\/p>\n

A lot of my friends and former teachers have posted things about what Harrison High School meant to them and why they\u2019re so sad about it, and at first, it seemed a little odd to me. Justified, maybe, but there are three more years before the school will actually close\u2014it seems weird to be reading things like \u201cI\u2019ll miss you, Harrison,\u201d like it\u2019s already all over. There are a few more years! We\u2019ll still be able to visit! It\u2019s not closing tomorrow!<\/p>\n

But, of course, one of the things that sucks about endings like this is that you have to create your own ending. Maybe there will be some day down the line, in 2019, when there\u2019ll be a Harrison closing party, and everyone will come back to Farmington and catch up and reminisce and be sad together. But we can\u2019t wait for three years to start the grieving process. Everything is set in stone now.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to argue for why Harrison shouldn\u2019t be closed, or to name the specific qualities that make it great. Aside from the football team and the IB program, there\u2019s a diversity at Harrison that just doesn\u2019t exist at other schools in the area. Really, though, I\u2019m not one of the most qualified people to argue for why Harrison\u2014the building, the school\u2014is objectively a great school. All I can tell you is what my very subjective, personal perspective is, having been a student there at four years.<\/p>\n

High school is kind of where I became a person\u2014at least, the person I am now. Sometime around 2012, I kind of hit on something and started liking myself more than I was used to. Before that, I\u2019d considered myself a pessimist. Seeing the world as full of douchebags and evil people somehow seemed hip and fun to me, and being a consistent user of sarcasm, I thought I was supposed to self-identify as a pessimist. Then I kind of realized being happy and being sarcastic weren\u2019t mutually exclusive, and I started looking at everything more positively, and I stopped worrying about at least a handful of my insecurities, and I started accepting sometimes that what would happen would happen, and I went into my senior year at my peak.<\/p>\n

I still sometimes think of my senior year of high school as my peak, even after three pretty good years of college. There was just something so beautiful about senior year, about facing the gaping hole of the future and not knowing exactly what it would be like but being excited for it. There was something so bittersweet, so oddly beautiful in its somberness, about hanging out with my friends and having fun but knowing that it was almost over. I had more friends than I ever had, and I was more confident than ever. I genuinely liked spending time with myself.<\/p>\n

Remembering my senior year of high school reminds me that as much as college has helped me become a smarter, more open-minded person, it\u2019s not where my personality was formed. College may have given me new experiences and pushed me out of my comfort zone, and I\u2019m really happy with how it\u2019s gone, but high school is where I had the most years of actual change.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s hard to think of a life before high school. There were 14 years of my life before, and I have a ton of memories from then, but somehow I\u2019m unable to conceive of myself as a real person with real experiences before then. Facing the void at the end of 12th<\/sup> grade wasn\u2019t terrifying just because of college; it was terrifying because it felt like I was leaving my own life entirely.<\/p>\n

So when I think about Harrison closing, that\u2019s what I\u2019m most sad about. The place where I became a person who I actually liked is not going to exist. And no matter how happy I am now, no matter how grateful I am that I got to experience Harrison while it was still there, the fact that it\u2019s closing kind of sucks.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a curious thing that happens when some sort of end is approaching: everything leading up to the end seems to happen specifically to provide you with a sense of closure. Conceiving of an ending as a sort of real-life TV season finale has been written about ad nauseam, by myself, by my fabulous friend Chloe Gilke<\/a>, and by anyone who consumes much too pop culture. It\u2019s a classic case of life seeming to imitate art.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m at the end of my junior year of college, which makes next year my last year. That\u2019s really terrifying, and I kind of hate talking or thinking about it for a variety of reasons. For one, I still kind of feel like I\u2019m 17 years old, completely dependent on adults who know more than me and unable to live on my own or do my taxes or think seriously about a career. Another weirdly big thing: I\u2019ve made a bunch of new friends at The Michigan Daily who are all freshmen and sophomores, so it\u2019s deeply sad to me that they\u2019ll have at least one or two more years there without me. It\u2019s like I\u2019m facing a two-year case of FOMO between the time when I\u2019m done at the Daily and the time when most of my friends are.<\/p>\n

But, for now, the end of the school year isn\u2019t a culmination of my whole college experience; it\u2019s more just a culmination of the year I\u2019m finishing. And several of my interactions with people have already seemed perfectly fitting with a season finale-esque ending. There\u2019s been one big, cathartic drunken sharing of previously unspoken feelings. One pleasant agreement that a friend and I wanted to rekindle our dormant friendship next year. One final fiction reading my friend gave, which showed me how far she\u2019d come since we first met in our creative writing class two years ago, and which somehow seemed a fitting last time to see her before she moves to Chicago.<\/p>\n

Today I hung out with a bunch of Daily friends and luxuriated in the warm temperatures. At around 7:00, it was perfect out; the sun was beginning to set as a casual concert happened on the diag. It was my friend Melina\u2019s last night in Ann Arbor until the fall, but my friend Karen is graduating and leaving in a week, so Melina and Karen had an emotional goodbye.<\/p>\n

I got into a conversation with Karen about how, for all we knew, once all of us eventually left school, many of us would never see each other again in our lives. Sure, we\u2019d all love to see each other again down the road, but many of us aren\u2019t from Michigan to begin with, so we wouldn\u2019t have much motivation to fly back. And life and jobs and relationships all get in the way of casual reunions.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m personally not that concerned about it because being mostly English, film, and communications majors, my friends at the Daily are mostly heading into similar fields. I know we\u2019ll end up running into one another at weird times in the future, and maybe contacting each other to network and get new job opportunities. Many of us will probably end up in New York City or Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

I talked to my friend Julie about all this, and she brought up high school. She said something that I\u2019ve heard from a lot of my friends: leaving high school made them realize how little they really cared about keeping most high school friends in their lives.<\/p>\n

I can understand that. I\u2019ve experienced it a little. I think back to some of my friends I considered great friends in high school and feel no serious need to reconnect with them now. I mean, like, it\u2019d be nice if I ran into them, but I only really think about many of them once in a while, if I\u2019m in a particularly nostalgic mood. Most of the time, I\u2019m focused on the people who are still in my life.<\/p>\n

But the real reason I\u2019m comfortable with where I am right now with most of my high school friends isn\u2019t that I don\u2019t really miss them. I do miss them! Even the ones I don\u2019t actively think about I wish I could see again. Sometimes I fantasize about high school reunions when we\u2019ll all reunite and reminisce.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s amazing to think about the fact that when college first started, I had a schedule to contact high school friends, some sort of systematic way of keeping up with them. I assigned people to different groups based on how often I \u2018had to\u2019 talk to them. Of course, it inevitably failed, and I don\u2019t know how I thought it could actually succeed. But my happy surprise is that it\u2019s unnecessary to talk to someone every single day or every week or every month or even every year to still feel love and closeness with them. It can wait.<\/p>\n

When I hung out with my high school friend Allison last winter break, I wasn\u2019t sure when I\u2019d see her next. When she dropped me back off at home, I could\u2019ve said, \u201cOkay, I\u2019ll see you over spring break, maybe?\u201d or \u201cAre you ever planning on visiting Ann Arbor?\u201d or \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll see you in the summer, if our schedules overlap.\u201d But I didn\u2019t say any of those things, because I understood that none of that was necessary. I just said, \u201cI\u2019ll see you when I see you.\u201d<\/p>\n

So yeah, I\u2019ll miss Harrison High School. Yeah, I\u2019ll miss Karen when she leaves, and my creative writing friend Holly, and Chloe. And a year from now, when I graduate from college, when I do say goodbye to all of these great people in my life, it\u2019ll inevitably be sad, because it\u2019ll mean seeing them a lot less often than I did before.<\/p>\n

But I also know it\u2019s not over. It never really is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my final blog post of the year, I wasn\u2019t sure what to write about. Girls aired an amazing two-part finale to a great fifth season last night, so I could write about that, a sort of check-in since my last post about it. I could write about the finales of Better Call Saul or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7593"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2178"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7593"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7596,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7593\/revisions\/7596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}