Dear 8th Grade Max,

Right around this time of year you are getting ready to leave middle school and embark on the next chapter of your journey, that being high school. High school is either the best 4 years, or worst 4 years of school. It is all about what you make of it. I am here to tell you that it isn’t all that bad. I’m going to outline what happens in high school for you and even your first year of college. The summers we can skip over for lack of lessons learned during those times.

You will start high school with no real sense of direction, no real clue as to where you want to end up. You will have fantastic teachers in 9th grade, including Mr. Woods, who will be key to your high school success. You will find out that it pays to have your parents know people, as they will get you involved with the baseball team. From that point on there will be no looking back. When baseball season rolls around, you will realize that there isn’t much time in your schedule for baseball, schoolwork and your friends from 8th grade. You will start to lose some of your friends and feel out of place. It will be the first adversity you face in your High School career.. You will get through it though.

Sophomore year won’t be as great as freshman year was. You will start to realize who your important friends are, and you will start making time for them. But unfortunately, you will learn that every good thing comes with a price attached. You will stop doing school work and prioritize friends and baseball, lowering your grades and giving you your first real taste of disappointing your parents. You will get your first taste at playoff baseball only to be knocked out by your rivals, a team you will come to loathe. The good news is, by the time summer rolls around, you will start to realize who your important friends are and you will have a hell of a summer.

Junior year is one of the best. I say that in terms of your social life. You will start to find out who your true friends are and the ones that will always be there to pick you up when you are down. You will meet one of your best friends and realize that they aren’t going away anytime soon. As you learned in sophomore year, however, every good thing will come with a price still. You will fail the Trig regents and have to go to summer school for it, not a fun experience. For all of the troubles in Trig, you will have an amazing time in 2nd period English. In the winter, you will help out the girls’ basketball team and think you have found your place, as a student assistant for whatever team needs you. You will fall in love with the game of baseball again and it will feel like you are 8 years old again, jumping into walk-off piles, playing for a championship, creating memories and friendships that will last a lifetime. You will end up crying on the field at SUNY Farmingdale after watching championship dreams get crushed and realizing the season is over. Junior year will be the best of the 4.

When senior year comes around, you won’t want to do ANYTHING related to school. It will cost you big time. You will end up sleeping through 9th period English class and failing 2 quarters, putting graduation in jeopardy. You will fail the Trig regents again, for the 3rd time. You will take the SAT once more and sign up for it a 4th time, but you won’t take it. You will help out the basketball team again and really enjoy the time you spend with them since they are a great group, but you won’t be around every game since you will get put on “academic probation” due to failing English and not having good grades in general. After basketball season, you will spend two weeks training to get into shape to try out for the baseball team. You won’t make the team though, sorry to break the news to you. The same day you get cut, you will get waitlisted for your top school. You will have your mind so set on that one school that you will lose track of what is really important when choosing a school. Baseball season will bring you back to a county championship, and again, you will fall just short. You will end your high school career going 0-2 in the county finals, but you will have so many brothers from baseball that high school will seem like it was a great 4 years. You will end up having to work your ass off to make sure you graduate by handing in the late work you have due as well as an extra assignment or two. Ultimately, you will graduate and go to prom without a date (not the end of the world) and you will enjoy it. High school will end and it will be on to college.

Year one of college will be strange. All of your friends go away to school and unfortunately you will stay home and go to community college due to mistakes you made in high school and a lack of readiness to go away. After a tough summer of goodbyes and mistakes, you will find a few friends in the back corner of a 3 hour history class and they will become the people you want to be around every week. They will help make your first semester of college much better than you will expect it to go. You will re-apply to East Stroudsburg with a 3.5 first semester GPA and you will be accepted. Mom and Dad as well as many others will notice a change and they will start to say you are ready to finally go away to school. You will know they are right.

During these 5 years, you will struggle with depression, anxiety, a loss of friends, and many other negatives. There will also be many positives. You will fall in love with country music which will help you relax when stressed. You will become a bit more confident in yourself and who you are in public, eventually not caring what people think. You will become someone you never would think about being. It will all work out for the better though. You will have great friends, great memories and even better stories. You will power your way through it all and it could be much worse. Just keep fighting through whatever curveballs life will throw at you, make the best of every situation and you will be fine.