Being asked to write a senior reflection was a strange moment for me. Senior Reflections? Already? Could I even write one of those? Until yesterday I had pages and pages about what I’ve gone through and how I got to where I am now. Then I scrapped it. All of it. 

Those pages wouldn’t sum up what my life has been like for the last four years because I never mentioned the most important thing that happened. I learned how to talk. 

At the start of high school I was just a kid with zero social skills and hardly any friends. No one knew who I was and I liked it that way. But I had a lot of neck pain from looking at the floor so often, and my knees were all scraped up from tripping over my own feet. I didn’t have the confidence to say my own name or tell people what I wanted or needed, and this inability to talk to others defined my existence for the first two years of high school. 

At some point, after hybrid ended, I had a moment where I realized that the reason no one ever talked to me was because I had never even said hi or introduced myself. I was stopping the conversation before it even started. After all that I had gone through, I was the one isolating myself. 

I learned that if I wanted to be a part of something or be friends with someone or have a good  relationship with administrators and teachers, then I needed to start communicating that! And thank god I did because in the fall of my junior year I was thrown into working in our school’s theater department, and a variety of other things, and emails and phone calls became part of my daily life.  

Since then, it’s been five shows, several book club meetings, college applications, two different jobs and the making of a whole yearbook. I got so many opportunities to put that hard work into practice. Today, I can say that I’ve broken out of my comfort zone and ended up with an amazing support system full of hobbies and great people. I can never urge anyone to step out of their comfort zone enough because you just might end up changing your life for the better.