A Guest Blog Post

The following post was written by my good friend Chelsea, who also has her own blog, The Black Umbrella, which focuses on psychology and perception. Here she reflects on her experience as a high school senior and her suffering of senioritis. Enjoy! 

A bad case of

(via Katey Lynn)

senioritis: a disease that affects every human being who has ever been a senior in high school. A senior with typical symptoms: not doing homework, not caring that they're not doing homework, not going to school because they're just not feeling going through the dragging process of attending classes that day, they don't pull out their assignment notebook until Sunday night at 11:30 (commonly confused with severe cases of procrastination), etc. They say the disease is contagious; airborne in fact. Seniors who haven't been hit yet, you're part of the lucky bunch. Seniors who have already been hit, you've probably been hit hard. And according to urban dictionary, there's only one cure: graduation. 

How can seniors become so apathetic so suddenly?

I was once a junior and boy does that feel like forever ago. A year can change so much. One moment I'm taking the ACT and the next I'm sending in a $300 enrollment deposit, confirming the next four years of my life. One day I'm pulling out my hair from all the stress that comes with US history homework and the next thing I know I don't even care about the C I get on my Calculus quiz.

The concept of time is a complex idea. In reality, you can only move forward with it. You can turn back clocks but you can never make it the same exact time as it was before. It will never be this date, this time ever again. This whole idea, I'll admit, scares me. The fact that I can't relive, that is. I can't relive that moment when I took the ACT (not that I'd want to), I can't be 16 again, I can't legally drive a car for the first time again, and I can't go back to how it used to be.  I can only look forward to what's ahead. And there's beauty in that. There's beauty in the mystery of the future. Change can be depressing, sure, but it can also be beautiful. There's so much to look forward to: graduation, college, pursuing a career that you want. It's all scary. But we can't escape the inevitability of change. It's the only thing that is consistent. So we might as well accept it, embrace it, and make the best out of the moments we have because there's no way to escape what we can't control.