Congratulations, Graduate
If someone were to ask me what the strangest year of my life has been, my answer would be the same as thousands of others. A simple mention of the year 2020 draws a shudder from anyone within earshot. It was a time when one of the worst periods in all our lives aligned. I was freshly eighteen and a senior in high school that January.
It’s important to note that I have always been an exceptional student. It sounds like I’m bragging, but I spent years conditioning myself to be so. My mother was a 4.0 student with a 30 on her ACT, and my parents expected the same of me. It was a value they raised me on. A’s were excellent, B’s were okay, and C’s and below were unacceptable. I’ve made the honor roll every semester of my life. Even when I was so depressed I faked being sick to get out of class every other week, my transcript would never reflect it. It’s my biggest source of pride, and senior year means that much more when academic achievements are your preferred form of validation. On top of that, I’ve always liked to get involved. That year, I was the captain of my high school cheer squad, performing in the show choir, and acting competitively in the speech organization, among other things.
I had done everything in my power to make sure I experienced my final year to the fullest. I won our senior pageant and celebrated homecoming like I never had before. I passed the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute auditions for the last time and received an acceptance letter from my dream school. I remember thinking, this is going to be the best year of my life. I knew about the spread of COVID-19 but never thought it would reach our sleepy town. When I left for spring break that March, I had two more months of high school and the whole world ahead of me. Only a couple of weeks after that, the world shut down.
On April 6th, I got the news that they canceled all future events and were moving classes online. I sat in my bed, numb and sick to my stomach. Senior prom and graduation are a rite of passage, but we would not get them. I’d put my senior year on a pedestal and had it taken from me without warning. It felt like being robbed of something promised to me. Something I’d spent my entire life chasing. Even weeks later, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I didn’t understand why, of every year there could have been a global pandemic, it had to be 2020. I thought, why us? Why me? Then I’d feel guilty for thinking so, painfully aware that so many people were dealing with far worse. Yes, I lost my senior year, big whoop… others lost their lives. I was stuck in a continuous cycle of wanting more, realizing I had more than most, and shaming myself for it. My disillusionment raged against my empathy for years. Even now, it still does.
Living in a small town, quarantine wasn’t as bad as I imagined it to be in a big city. I would drive to my best friend Abby’s house and park in her alley. She would pull her car over, park six feet from me, and we would roll down our windows to talk. We sat there for hours on end, back and forth between pitying ourselves and pitying the world. We lamented about how we’d felt all year that “the other shoe” would drop eventually, but we weren’t expecting a boot full of concrete. We complained about being stuck with our families, and she moved out of her father’s house not long after.
Many things happened through quarantine. Needless to say, I didn’t attend OSAI or enroll at my dream school. Graduation was a sheet of paper I picked up off a table and cars honking from a mile away. Grocery shopping was like ghost hunting in an abandoned house. The pictures will never do it justice. You had to be there to see the wall-to-wall barren shelves to truly understand the emptiness. I became a (grossly underpaid) essential worker for three months, realized I hated my job, and quit. I fell out of touch with most of my friends. Grieving the experiences I’d never get, a heavy depression set in. I didn’t see my therapist for six months. Everything felt meaningless… but that was okay. Abby lives in her own house now, which meant total freedom for us.
When the most stable part of your identity disappears, it leaves a void within you. And I coped with it the only way I knew how: by numbing it out. In truth, a lot of that time is a blur. Abby’s eighteenth birthday came in early March (when they postponed school before later canceling it). We, along with some of the other seniors, threw a “corona” themed party for it. It was insensitive looking back, but what else could we do? Turning it into a joke staved off the inevitable reality. The only thing we did was party after that. We were high on something all day and drank until we passed out at night. It made us feel good. It was the only thing that made sense and we clung to it. I could claim the excuse of “stimulating my creativity” but that isn’t true. I just wanted to be anywhere else other than where I was.
Three years later, I’ve long since been out of that spiral. I’m set to graduate again soon, I hope at a ceremony with an actual audience this time. But I still feel like that eighteen-year-old girl, lost and uncertain. I’m forever chasing after everyone else, always behind. I want to grab life by the back of her shirt and say: Wait for me, please. I’m still not ready. I don’t think I ever was. I missed that moment of closure, and now I have to live with this door ajar for the rest of my life. Halfway between a scared child and a desperate adult. If someone were to ask me what the strangest year of my life has been, the answer would be 2020. The year we made history in a way we still haven’t fully recovered from. I wonder if we ever will.
Kylee Harzman is a senior studying Criminal Justice and Psychology at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. She has been passionate about creative writing and poetry since learning to read and write. She was accepted to the esteemed Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute in 2018, 2019, and 2020, and serves as the president of her university’s creative writing club, Writers’ Roundtable. She hopes this publication will be the first of many and looks forward to sharing her stories with the world.