High School and the Unbearable Feelings Going to High School Gives You
The moral case for allowing yourself to feel the way high school has affected you.
Author’s Note: If you want to know more about the show, check out Tegan and Sara discussing it on their own Substack.
High school is a weird time for people.
It's awkward and uncomfortable and things never happen the way you want them to. Everyone feels like an outsider in one way or another, even the people who seem like they fit in. Which is part of the reason why going through it inspires people to feel so much pain and anxiety when they look back at it. There's an entire genre dedicated to what happens to people in high school. All in some attempt to come to terms with what that time in your life feels like. To make what happened worth it by expressing it to the world the way you couldn't when you were young. As if at some point a perfect example will emerge and everyone will just get it. The world according to high school will make sense and no one will ever feel these feelings again. Yet what ends up happening is that no matter how many times an example comes up, the next generation still feels the pain of it all.
When you see the way it's depicted however, it's often a high stakes game of some kind. Situations where the world is ending or people are dealing with pregnancies or gangs or any of the types of things that seem to make it something worthy of the feelings high school gives you. Stakes like that feel like the only reasonable analog other people can relate to. For most people though, it's not a life and death struggle. If you don't get what you want, the world isn't going to end. Despite this reality though, it still feels like an emotional roller coaster. Just because something feels mundane and ordinary, doesn't mean what you're going through isn't everything to you. Like it's not actually the end of the world. It feels unbearable and like you'll never find a way out of it. Of course, anyone who manages to get out of high school knows that it ends and that it's not a catastrophe.
High School is a beautiful example of what it feels like to go through its namesake. Tegan and Sara, as played brilliantly by Railey Gilliland and Seazynn Gilliland, may not be dealing with the high stakes situations of the world ending, but it still feels like it's important. Like the world might end if they don't get what they need. You want them to have the best high school experience they can have. You want them not to be going through the pain they're very much living with. Although part of you knows that at some point they will get out of it. We even see some glimmer of it at certain points. Moments like when Tegan hangs out with Maya, and when Sara spends time with Phoebe. Those little conversations we all remember having where life doesn't seem so bad.
It's hard to look back at that time in your life and see how most of us were at some point. To feel the unbearable feelings that high school gives you. But High School is a fantastic example of why you should.
Do yourself a favour and check out High School as soon as you can.
You can watch High School on Amazon Freevee.
Very interesting! Haven't heard of this show before. Will check it out.
Great post! I hated high school and I remember going to an assembly where one of the teachers got up to speak and told all us--a bunch of miserable high school kids--to remember and cherish these days because *they are going to be the BEST days of your lives.* I thought holy shit, why don't they just hand out cyanide capsules, because if this is as good as it gets, kill me now. That was a really demented thing to tell a bunch of kids who didn't plan on peaking in high school. Luckily, I had other people in my life, including my parents, who were able to give me perspective about where the low-stakes drama of high school and those awful feelings fit into the big picture. It turns out, the best days are ahead :-)