High School Drama

I was confined at home on a Saturday night due to a combo of flu and pharyngitis. After emerging from a 12-hour, medication-induced coma, I found myself sitting in front of the television and watching the Saturday night episode of PBB Teen Edition. PBB is acronym for Pinoy Big Brother (the Filipino franchise of the popular reality show). If watching a group of individuals sitting around and occasionally dancing, arguing, playing while trapped in a big house wasn't bad enough, this version of the show showcases teenage housemates. This is going to be interesting, I thought. A dozen or so hormonal girls and boys, living under one roof, free from parental control, with cameras religiously capturing their every gesture to validate their attention-starved egos..there's bound to be lots and lots of drama here! Sure enough, the show exceeded my expectations. I was able to sit through 10 minutes of it before I crawled back to my room, repulsed by the teen drama I just witnessed. Why am I so affected? Mainly because it reminded me vaguely of my own high school days.

I know this would sound so unoriginal, but I consider my stint in high school as the worst 4 years of my life. On hindsight, it wasn't that bad though. It was during high school when I met some of the friends that I know would be in my life forever, including my best friend. I also met my soul mate--the man I'll spend the rest of my life with--on the first day of high school (although back then we didn't have any inkling that we'd end up together, but that's another story.) Looking back to it all, I can now laugh goodnaturedly and tell myself that it's no big deal, that I survived despite my teenage awkwardness and emo tendencies. However, I can still remember how it felt like. Somehow, while I was still there and experiencing it all, it felt like hell for me. I hated every moment of it.

If I could go back in time, I'd definitely go back to high school to give the 12-year-old me a lecture on how to survive the next four years without getting scarred for life.

Don't be too hard on yourself. It's good to study hard but it's not a mortal sin to have fun once in a while. Some of the most important lessons you will learn in life are not from the pages of a textbook or written on the classroom whiteboard by a professor who looks eerily like Einstein. Open yourself up to new experiences, don't confine yourself inside your self-made box.

You will learn through your mistakes. While still figuring out who you are and what your place in the world is, you'd sometimes make a fool of yourself, go through painful humiliation and commit social suicide. The good news is that you'll live. You will get over it. In a few years' time you'd be able to reminisce and just laugh at how silly you were when you thought it was the end of the world just because your frenemy let it slip in front of the whole class who your secret crush was.

Don't be such a nerd. Although being cool and popular is not the singularly most important achievement at this stage, if you could avoid looking and acting like a big dork, then that would help you heaps. You may have convinced yourself that your mental aptitude is way above the high school drama that everybody else is preoccupied with, but when you go to college and study Psychology, you'd realize that you only hated the guts of all those pretty, popular girls because you were secretly jealous of all the attention they were getting.

Don't be too obsessed with the future. I know it's tough being in that not-a-kid-anymore-but-not-an-adult-yet phase, but if you keep on looking ahead and wishing it would all be over, you'd miss out on a lot of things. Take time and smell the roses, enjoy being a teen, goof around with your friends, fall in "puppy" love, make fun of the teachers behind their backs. Before you know it, four years have gone by and you'll be stunned to realize that you will miss all the crazy retards in your class after all. So make the most out of this stage in your life when the most complicated problem you'd face is just finding the value of x if 2x - y = 13/8y + 69.

Oh, if I only knew all these nuggets of wisdom back when I was a teenager, it would have saved me a great deal of drama and stress!

“It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle.” 
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly