As much as being a senior is made out to be an accomplishment, leaving high school is not as big of a deal as everyone makes it out to be. I haven’t graduated yet so don’t take my word as law, but my ethos stands tall in the shadow of my seniority. That’s right, almost four years down the hatch at Rosary!

Days will trickle by, and one by one, we will all do what we must. We will shed our baby faces for the ones that will litter pictures for years to come until one wrinkle at a time makes our memories strangers. We will watch our friends’ faces start to look like those of real people. We will long to leave every day until we do and we’re sick to our stomachs when we realize that we’ve been evicted rather than liberated. We will pack our bags.

And yet, don’t mistake my tone for mourning, as much as Mr. Bevins or Ms. Barclay might read into it. I say this with contentedness. I say this with a premature finality that haunts each passing hour of seniority, a certainty that lingers in the moments of laughter I share with my friends.

And don’t mistake my contentedness for arrogance. I don’t know if my future will be good or bad, if I’ll get into the schools I want, if I’ll make it to any at all. But I have a secret.

My secret isn’t scandalous in the traditional sense, though I have been asking Ms. Barclay for a gossip column. For some reason, she keeps vetoing it. I’ll have to keep working on that. My secret is one that once heard will fester in you until there’s nothing left inside you but contentedness. Or perhaps arrogance, but who knows?

My secret has been mine for a while, one that I hold close to my heart. It’s one that often earns me strange looks.

My secret is that no one in the whole world is old.

This may seem strange at first, but I promise you, it’s more than real.

The idea of feeling frozen in time, forever young, trapped on a Keats-like urn, and forever beautiful offers obvious caveats that may make my secret feel moot. I understand that. But know that by the time you are a senior and are ready to be evicted, the world around you will change colors. Your teachers, the staff, the administration, strangers, parents– all are youths trapped in aging bodies.

I do not mean that your personality doesn’t age; I mean that consciousness is one thing and isn’t exclusively immature to you. No one knows what they’re doing! It’s downright dystopian. I don’t know many things that I would consider “adult,” like how to open a checking account or change a tire. No one does until they do. It’s the default to not know.

If you think there’s something that you’re missing about being a functioning person, I hate to say it, but there isn’t. Silly little people litter this world and not one has a clue. We’re all newborns that have good dexterity and decent hand-eye coordination skills and can perhaps tie their shoes.

All these adults, these teachers, these strangers, they all didn’t know. And they do now, though they still don’t about some things.

So take my word for it: to grow up and to move on is not a big deal. You are another clueless person in a plethora of confused geriatrics like myself, and someday you will learn all the things that seemed abstractly adult. And you will learn that they are just things and you are just a person. And no one knows anything at all.

An overrated underrated author named John Green once wrote magnificently, “It is so hard to leave– until you leave. And then it is the easiest thing in the world.” Don’t be afraid to leave and to grow: it’s the easiest thing you’ll ever do.