When people say that you will remember your graduation day for the rest of your life, they truly mean it.  I never expected for my graduation to turn out the way it did.  Then again, none of my school memories have a normalcy to them in the first place.  

Graduation day started with the sun shining on every open space in my small Idaho town.  My parents and I sat outside in the sun and discussed how clear the sky appeared to be.  Not a single cloud was in sight, and the sunshine boosted my mood about graduation.  Growing up, I always expected myself to be super thrilled to graduate, but when I stood up to get ready for the ceremony, a neutrality about the situation floated in the air. The surrealism of finally being done with high school did not hit me until an enormous storm cell made its way over the football field my high school’s graduation ceremony traditionally is held at. When the administrators decided to move the ceremony inside and delay it by an hour, I realized that I would probably never see all my classmates again.  All the memories I shoved to back of my brain appeared again like a tsunami, and I remembered all the effort it took to make it to graduation day in the first place.  All the late nights fueled with caffeine to get those ten-page research papers in, or the rigorous math homework that took hours to do on top of the other battles we deal with. The battles with our friends, at work, or within our own households. We all need to be proud of ourselves, no matter how old we are.

As cliché as it sounds, graduation is a stepping stone to the rest of our lives. We discover who we are throughout our high school years.  We do not know what career path we want to go down when we are born, and high school teaches us a lot about our personalities and what we love to do.  Sometimes we get too caught up in situations to really appreciate the affect they have on our lives and our future.  I always expected to graduation to be the best day of my life because high school would be over. I was wrong. Graduating is one of the best memories I have to date because it shows the progress my classmates and I went through to become the people we are today. All it took was a little rain in a town that rarely sees it.