The summer before I entered LM, I grew three inches. It wasn’t until the fall came and I traded my shorts for jeans that I processed the change; I looked like I was preparing for a biblical flood with the high waters I was rocking. I didn’t feel any taller, but after the first few weeks of enduring passive comments and biting jokes about it, I certainly felt much bigger. Though most aunts and grandmas assured me my situation was enviable, for a 15-year-old girl it was less than ideal. These days there is an abundance of messaging about taking up space, but in 2019, the self-love PR wave was still lying dormant, waiting for some sort of global anthropologically-impactful, two-year reset to put it in motion.
It took me four years to find a handful of pants that fit me. A pair of cargo scrubs recommended by a girl who sat next to me in the Louisville Airport. Secondhand Gap jeans with someone else’s initials sewn under the cuff. My friend’s brother’s sweatpants that I always return a day late (sorry Jack). The point isn’t really about inseam or denim washes or even about how to love yourself despite being different in some way; the point is that high school is a pair of Brandy Melville skinny jeans. For one, they’re kind of bland. They’re stiff, unchanging, one size fits all. More importantly, however, is the fact that while some people may fit in them, most won’t. It’s okay not to fit in here; in fact, it makes you more like everyone else.
High school isn’t made to fit you; it’s made to shape you. Some people benefit from the structure, the guided hand that the school day provides; but at the end of the day, the walls aren’t made to conform to our bumps and edges. Even after we’re gone, the walls will still be the walls. The most we can do is hope that we leave behind evidence of our passage through them. The most we can do is hope that we’ve stretched them out enough to fit the next kids a little looser; to give them a little more room to grow into themselves. I see this evidenced most greatly by the incoming classes, whose extreme style choices alone give me hope for a future without any of this squeezing in that makes high school intolerable most of the time.
To my brilliant classmates, my most sincere hope is that wherever you plan on spending the next years of your life, you won’t waste them on a different pair of jeans.
