While in high school, I spent so much time asking myself why is this so important that eighty-something percent of us feel like it’s something we need to do? To counterbalance, I tried to make myself believe that I only felt such frustration with it because it was a pain to deal with at that moment in time, and someday in the future, I would look back and appreciate it.

But now it is the future.

And I don’t.

Thinking back to those four years, I honestly can’t tell you a singe thing that I retained from school. My highlights were acing a long, no multiple choice, completely written physics final that I pretty much BSed my way through somehow, and being assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice, and The Yellow Wallpaper, which all became some of my favorite pieces of literature. Even that doesn’t fully count though, because in reality, I’ve always championed classic literature and likely would have gotten to each of those on my own at some point or another. I now work in a library, for crying out loud.

I ended up graduating school “with honors,” but the thing is, I never felt honored by it. In a way, it always felt ridiculous and kinda fake. The same kinda way landing on the free parking space with a heap of cash under the corner of a Monopoly board feels. Sure, there’s a surge of joy that comes with it, but at the end of the day, it’s not real life, and it’s certainly not real money. It’s important in the game of Monopoly, but in life? Who gives a crap?

Why did I have to spend hours staring at a calculus textbook, but never learned a single thing about how to pay taxes and what they’re used for? Why did I never learn how to go about buying a house, or to realistically budget and manage debt? How to fix broken things, mend broken hearts, heal broken families? How to love imperfect people and find friends who give energy instead of take? How to deal with death and funerals? How fast time flies and the importance of not taking a single second for granted because everything can and will be different someday? How seemingly small and insignificant decisions can lead to big things that alter the course of your entire life? How all everyone wants is to feel like we belong, even if that means it’s to the wrong person or crowd? How cruel the world can be, but also how amazingly beautiful. How even when I feel like I finally understand life, I just don’t? There’s always so much to learn.

We don’t learn these things in a classroom because they can’t be taught. The best teacher is simply to live.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel salty about the education system as a whole. It gets better after high school, kids. Sorta. It also gets a million times worse. And then we die.

So goes life.