A Cure for Senioritis

I was talking earlier this week with one of my favorite students, a senior who has been bright-eyed and cheerful almost every day for four years in high school, who has made the most of her opportunities in the classroom and in extra-curricular programs, who has a very promising future in front of her. Yet despite all of these wonderful things, she looked worn out, and our conversation was heavy. “Mr. Harbaugh,” she said finally, “I’m exhausted. I really don’t want to be in high school anymore.” 

I understood what she was telling me. This transition from high school to the future for our soon-to-be-graduates, soon-to-be-real-world-citizens takes a great deal of mental and emotional energy, not to mention the stress and strain of relationships changing at school with friends and at home with parents. These students are experiencing the end of the world as they know it, and it reminds me of the great quote about growing up from novelist Herman Hesse: “in order to be born, one must first destroy a world.” This growing up stuff is exhausting, and should be, and this senior student, like the rest of her classmates, is worn out. 

Because I think senioritis is a funny term to describe a necessary process, I’m not sure there is a cure for it, or even that there should be. In my experience with seniors, one of the things that is most difficult in the last months of high school is how much conflict they experience as they think about the things they want to gain as they graduate and move forward in their lives, in contrast with the things they don’t want to lose or leave behind. Their hearts are torn in two, and it is this very conflict that is most exhausting. So while there may be no cure for senioritis, I do think there is a cure for exhaustion, and for the conflict behind the exhaustion. It comes from the Welsh poet David Whyte, who learned it from a Benedictine monk. According to Whyte the cure for exhaustion is not rest. The cure for exhaustion is whole-heartedness. 

To be whole-hearted means to embrace fully those parts of the experience of the last few months of high school that result from the hard work of many years of growing up. I have yet to meet a senior who would choose to go back to being thirteen or fourteen and struggling with the challenges of early-adolescent identity development. Instead of uncertainty about who they are, seniors are full of bluster, over-confidence sometimes, and fully inscribed personalities. As seniors these young men and women have made decisions and commitments about who they are as individuals; they’ve worked to shape themselves through trial and error, and know what parts of themselves they’ll take with them into adulthood, and also what parts of themselves they’ve shed or outgrown and will leave behind. 

To be whole-hearted is to fully feel passion in all of the possibility of what’s next. To be whole-hearted is to share that passion with those people you hold most dear. To be whole-hearted is to see the conflict of the transition from high school to happily-ever-after as a good thing, like a good walking stick for the long hike ahead. 

Most of all, to be whole-hearted means not being torn in two by conflict. Yes, the conflict is there, but it’s not the thing that fills the heart. What fills the heart is passion: for who you are, and what, and whom, you care about. 

That’s my response to worn-out seniors like the young woman in my office this week, and it’s what I’ll advise the rest of her classmates as I work with them in the coming months, looking forward to that time in the near future when they’ll once again be as bright-eyed and shiny as the day I met them. 

(Original written 4/16/2008)