Ever since I began writing for the Knight Krier website in November of 2023, I’ve been thinking about my future senior editorial. I read every single one that was on the website. I was struck by how much power and confidence was exuded by these seniors in one of their final pieces of writing of their high school career. In my junior mind, the end of my senior year was still very far away. I looked forward to the day when I would finally feel powerful and confident like all those seniors did. I looked forward to the day that I could cement those emotions in writing in my senior editorial.

Throughout my senior year, I’ve thought about what my senior editorial would be. My swan song. My goodbye. I had a hard time imagining it. For a while, I wasn’t sure why I struggled to come up with ideas for my editorial. I love to write. I’m majoring in creative writing in college. So why couldn’t I figure out what I wanted to write for this editorial?

In these last couple of weeks, I realized that my struggles to write this thing came from the fact that I didn’t feel how I felt a senior should feel yet. I didn’t feel strong or powerful or confident. I felt like my usual self. I still walked through the crowded halls anxiously, worried that I would bump into a passerby or trip on someone’s leg. I struggled to speak up in any of my classes and show true personality. I struggled to start conversations with others. The beautiful power and confidence that was so present in the writings of past seniors detailing their excitement for college and their personal growth from throughout high school wasn’t inside of me.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought about how I would feel as an adult. I imagined myself as a strong, confident person far away from myself at that time. I imagined how much more self-actualized I would be by the time high school graduation came around. Since graduation has been coming closer and closer, that illusion has fallen. I have since spent a lot of time mourning the loss of that person I had dreamt up. In the words of the band The Front Bottoms, a band who arguably got me through the experience that is high school, “I guess I’m older now.”

I think I have been thinking about this all wrong. Senior year coming to a close isn’t an end for me. This isn’t it. This editorial isn’t my swan song. There is still time. So much time for me to change and grow, and while this change has taken longer than I expected and wished it would, I have to keep trying. I may not be the exact perfect person I imagined I would be as a child, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done anything in high school that I’m proud of. Anything that showed personality and confidence. I’ve written many long, self-indulgent rambles about movies and television that have been published on the Knight Krier website. I’m the co-president of the AEONS literary magazine, a club whose members were a large part of the reason that I began to strive to accept myself and show my true self to the world in the first place. And despite not being the perfect person I naively thought I would be by now, I love myself, and I think that’s what matters most.

So… yeah. Goodbye, Norwin. Goodbye, newspaper. Goodbye, AEONS. Goodbye, W.I.R.C reading competition, a competition I’ve been a part of for seven years. Goodbye to eating lunch every day with my best friend. We’ll have to move our get-togethers to his living room with some bad movie playing in the background. Now that I think about it, I’ll still read. I’ll still write. I’ll still rant about movies, whether that be verbally or in writing. So I guess if you think about it that way, this isn’t a goodbye at all.