At the end of each year, we are confronted with the slippery idea of “holiday spirit.” In a temporal sense, the term refers to the culture of prioritizing gratitude, familial love, and introspection in November and December. Fall and Winter Break emphasize this expectation: the countdown to January 1 and its amalgamation of bitter and sweet, finality and hopefulness, is to be spent celebrating how the year has shaped you.
This winter, however, many of us on the Senior Editorial Board find ourselves distanced from the so-called holiday spirit. We often hesitate to engage in joyful activities during this stressful time—we place family time below meeting academic and Regular Decision deadlines.
Last Friday, at a College Counseling Office class meeting, our college counselors prepared Class I students for receiving decisions as if heading into combat: “visualize where you’ll be when you open the email;” “prepare yourself for all outcomes;” “allow yourself days to mourn.” Though well-intentioned, those meetings contributed to the commonly accepted belief that college is the end-all-be-all. Indeed, this three-week stretch before Winter Break has been moving at a snail’s pace. We can’t escape the fear that we’re toiling away towards our doom: rejection.
There’s no denying that college is a gargantuan stressor in high school. From the beginning of freshman year, many Milton students hold it at the forefront of their minds. There, the “big C” hovers through every quiz, club election, or summer program, all the way until Senior Fall mercifully comes to an end. Seniors before us warn of broken friendships, the 2 a.m. supplemental essay grind and the exhausting wait for “everything to work out in the end.” Anxiety surrounding college puts a shadow over too much of our high school experience.
But now that Senior Fall has come and gone, most of us here at The Measure agree that the work and the wait could have been much less stressful if the school didn’t have such a pessimistic college-app culture.
Milton’s culture of glorifying cynicism encourages us to seek the negative. Indeed, the Senior Fall experience seems incomplete without the act of complaining about it. This pessimism has bled into conversations beyond just college talk. It seeps into everyday exaggerations such as, “I’m going to literally fail,” before tests and in-class essays. It appears in those of us who wear their sleep deprivation like a badge of honor. In a world in which cynicism seems cool—when hyperbolic retellings warp the true nature of the event—we feed into the narrative that life stops at college decisions.
What we forget in this process is that everything passes. The problems and stresses of life will continue to exist in new shapes that no acceptance letter can shield us from. What if Milton really was a preparatory school, a place where we prepare for our futures, rather than a place in which we all desperately sprint towards college as the light at the end of the tunnel?
We need to infuse more of our year with the holiday spirit, carving out time for family, friends, and goals. Moreover, if we cope with senior year together by comforting one another through this anxiety-ridden stretch, we can prevent our solitary stress and make our personal essays and supplemental materials a little less demanding.
Stress is inevitable in the face of college applications, but let’s layer that stress with finding joy in the people around us. Instead of delaying celebration until that “submit” button has been pushed, let’s allow the holiday spirit to carry us through the stress of Senior Fall.