Crossing the (virtual) door

Eleventh grade. Nostalgia and impatience to leave. A somewhat still anxiousness for what is to come, but an everlasting denial that we will be, for better or worse, taking up a real place in this world. Fear and excitement. Procrastination and sudden bursts of energy to fill out college applications and complete homework. In a nutshell – a very complicated nutshell – that is how I would describe eleventh grade. From the few video calls with my friends and classmates that my Internet has allowed me to listen to entirely, I can say that’s how we all feel. 
I have been waiting to write about this for so long. I had somehow fantasized about this typical value-what-you-have-until-it’s-over essay I’d heard every single eleventh grader does. Maybe the day we get back together in the classroom we will. Maybe yet another Covid rising curve will keep us all writing from home. And, just maybe, someday I will get the inspiration to write something like that. For now, all I can tell is that we know we are taking the very first step in the drastic changes we saw coming, but it all feels numb.
We could not make the triumphant entrance, the (always) intentional humblebrag about our senior jackets, or scream at the top of our lungs, but in the end, this was all fine. We got over it. The issue is the collection of underlying transformations that don’t cease to make themselves evident. Many are struggling to decide their career. Others have piles of college applications they can barely stare at stressfully as they try to sort out virtual school. Even some are already enrolled in college, getting their first taste at filling out “adult” paperwork. Above all, it is the reality that we have to start taking real, implacable responsibility now. It is not about grades or friends now. It is our life, career, and potentially our happiness at least over the next 4 years. 
The absolutely best part of it all is that we have to navigate these changes through mere clicks in a screen. Sitting all day, time seems either frozen or voraciously blowing, flying away. 
Our other family members are overwhelmed enough too, and at some point, their advice – despite how kind they may be – is just ephemeral. And those experts, teachers, and mentors we desperately need now to talk to, hug (even argue with!) are behind a screen. Any meeting is left to be lucky enough to get your emails answered. Sharing screens is never the same than to sketch, erase, and sketch again a plan for what your tentative future is. No camera can replace bursting emotion and worries to who you look out for guidance. It simply can’t.
Yet, just like that, we had to open the door for our decisions and most surprising personal changes to take place. This is the transformation that to my perspective (is this the bright side?) makes us truly in this together. Just maybe, deciphering how to cross that door through Zoom and Google Meet will make the best eleventh grade essays this school has ever seen.