As graduation is near, I am able to reflect on the four years of time I have had at Warsaw High school. I enjoyed my time here and all the things I was involved in immensely. I think I can speak for many seniors when I say sophomore year was the glory year for most of us. Our last COVID free year also happened to be the year that we all watched Ameer land a sick back flip from the rafters of the ceiling in between classes. Our sophomore year was the kind of year we didn’t realize we should be cherishing in the moment until the moment was gone.
Being the leader I have been throughout high school, I found myself maintaining a positive, optimistic attitude for the sake of others, even more so when COVID hit our class so hard, and left us all in the dark, not knowing what would come next. I am able to say that now that it is all said and done that I am sad that our last two years looked the way they did, but I am proud of how we as a class handled it. In addition to this, I think we can all agree the past year and a half has given us a perspective on the importance and power of positive thinking.
I have lived in Warsaw my whole life, and I attended John Boise Middle School before coming to the high school. Not many things stuck with me from middle school, due to constantly wishing it away, eager to get to high school. Middle school is where North and South school merged and we all started figuring ourselves out and who our friends were. For a lot of us, this is where our small journey together began. With help from the squad pics in between classes, the rubber band wars and the many Mannequin challenges, middle school went by fast. But one thing stood out to me throughout the years – one phrase to be exact. Probably because Mrs. Johnson absolutely drilled it into my head as often as she could.
I had Katie Johnson as my guidance counselor sixth through eighth grade, and something she often said to not only me, but the student body as well, was sometimes you just have to “fake it until you make it.”
This phrase suggests that by imitating confidence, competence and an optimistic mindset, a person can realize those qualities in their real life. This has been in the back of my mind and I have reminded myself of it often throughout the last four years. Now as a senior, I look at where I am today, student body president, second year editor-in-chief of the newspaper, president of FBLA and frankly, I feel as if I faked my way all the way here. Others, looking from the outside in, may not see it that way, for I have worked hard for what I have accomplished and the people around me have physically seen that, but to me, hard work just seemed to be one of the many necessary steps in the whole process of accomplishing the goals that I had set for myself in eighth grade. But as a freshman, being the student body president always just seemed to be a thought of mine that was nowhere near obtainable. So I started talking about it, I told all my friends, all my teachers, I put it out there so that people could hold me accountable. The fake it until you make it mentality helped me to manifest where I am today and I encourage people to implement this into their own lives as often as I can.
Push yourselves. Beyond what you think your capabilities are, this in turn, will broaden your capabilities without you even realizing it. You can genuinely acquire certain qualities by acting like you already had them. The way I see it is, I didn’t necessarily fake it until I made it, I faked it until I became it. I personally implemented the phrase “fake it until you make it” into my everyday mannerisms. And throughout the last four years, by making a few uneducated decisions and trial and error, I have learned to value the importance of kindness and good will and that, although not everyone deserves this from me, I will always offer it up to anyone and everyone I find myself meeting or crossing paths with. I learned that hard work and drive is something that molds people into the person they are, and doesn’t just get them to where they desire to be.
You must aspire to be the person you have never had the courage to be. Gradually, you will discover that you are that person, but until you can see this clearly, you must pretend and invent.