This year marks a significant milestone in my life. I have finally departed from the ACS family of schools, finished off the last year of organised education and freed myself from IB. It is quite clearly the end of this chapter.
Over the last few weeks, I have been assaulted by a flurry of thoughts, feelings and emotions that descended upon me as I fully absorbed the fact that here it is – the end of this chapter and it won’t wait for me to procrastinate any longer. I felt overwhelmed. Of the feelings that lingered, one was the feeling that soon this experience – IB, school, friends and everything – would fade from my memory. Over the years, I would slowly but surely forget the pains of staying up late, the joys of finishing an assignment and the pleasure found in the good company. All of this would feel so distant. I was gripped by the fear that it would all be gone. It pushed me to write something down, to at least capture a fragment of this moment within these unwieldy words of mine, jumbled together to form sentences, paragraphs and this blog entry. Subsequently, I wondered if it would be considered cliched, to write a post to document this already well-documented ending. I finally decided I would write it, partly because of a related realisation on my part that one doesn’t always have to do something new, creative and unexpected to learn from the experience and to grow from it. Just as it is important that each individual learns how to prove basic mathematical formulae discovered centuries ago, writing this blog post would play an important role in my path to deciphering all that I felt over the past few weeks.
To begin, I thought I would mention how I would definitely feel sad leaving so much behind. I will no longer see all my previous teachers along the corridor, no longer eat the food from the SAC, no longer walk along the corridors of this school and it is all immensely saddening. More importantly however, I realised that this means that I will no longer be able to add onto that list of “Things I did in Secondary School”. This is particularly depressing for me. Over much of the past 18 years of my life, I have carried along with me this relentless and perhaps blind optimism that keeps me going at times when everything feels hopeless. I seem to have this uncanny ability to think that everything would turn out fine even if nothing seems to suggest it. I hope when there should be no hope. Basically this means that I dream a lot and I have had dreams of doing quite a number of unrealistic things over the span of my life in school. The end of this chapter has forced me to accept that perhaps many of these dreams would never come true. I distinctly remember dreaming about getting spectacular grades for an English Essay or winning a Medal in prestigious competition. I would have to accept that none of this would ever happen again. Worst still, I would never even be learning English formally again. It is something I will have to learn to accept, over the days and weeks that pass by. However, I hope it is something that I will never forget because I hope I don’t feel the same way when the final chapter of my life comes to an end.
It is probably apt at this point to disregarding these regrets that fill me with sadness and to move on to some brighter aspects of my school life. I have realised that the best thing this school has brought me is the people. I have a wonderful bunch of friends. I cannot begin to describe how much I owe these people. The only regret I have is that I never appreciated them as much as I should have or thanked them enough for putting up with me. They have at every turn been obliging and willing to help. They are also people who have in many aspects been consistently brilliant, something I never realised till much later. I sincerely hope I never lose these friends.
Time and again I have lamented how if we were to be home-schooled we might have finished the syllabus much faster. This however, was never the point of going to school. In addition to the many friends I have made, the people I have met in school have taught me to better appreciate the different talents in different people. At some point over these 12 years, I began to realise how there was so much to appreciate in each and every unique person. I believe I have grown to be more able to empathise with people and relate to people, to place myself in another person’s shoes to feel what he feels, see what he sees and hear what he hears. It is not something that I am terribly good at, but it is something that I feel the people here have taught me and shown me and something I am thankful to have learnt though I dare not say I have mastered.
All in all, these 12 years they have been eventful and I hope the next few will be even more eventful. I am thankful for all that has not gone wrong and all that I have learnt. I wish everyone the best and I suppose this brings to an end a truly long overdue blogpost which will hopefully bring a close this chapter of my life.
