I do not know what you, the reader of this article, need to hear about my high school experience. I don’t even know if you want to hear about any of it. 

I could tell you that when I came to McCaskey, I thought there was one right way to be a person, and that way was warped by my own insecurities and fears. 

I could tell you that the people I met here have fundamentally changed who I am, and helped to shape the kind of person I aspire to be. 

I could tell you that I have found immense stability and community at this school, and those are not things I will ever forget. 

But my story is one among very, very many.

And that, my friend, is the beauty of McCaskey High School. This place is so overwhelming and yet so welcoming, so confusing and yet so simple. To love this school is to give it everything you have. 

And it is always here. 

Even when people accidentally start fires in the trash can or accidentally pull the fire alarm and everyone has to go outside, it’s here. 

The cement and the brick do not change depending on how you feel or where you’re coming from. The distance from one building to another does not get farther or shorter, even if you bike, or drive, or even walk in slow motion (yes, I see you, travelers). 

That girls’ bathroom stall door on the first floor of JP will still have the words “SO SPICY” etched into it in giant, capital letters even after you’ve been away for a year (I try to visit that stall whenever I’m in the area, just for the nostalgia), and that one patch of floor in the lost wing will always be just a little bit crunchy. 

“Sandcastles are beautiful,” the author Glennon Doyle wrote in her 2020 memoir Untamed. “But we cannot live inside them. Because the tide rises. That’s what the tide does. We must remember: I am the builder, not the castle. I am separate and whole, over here, eyes on the horizon, sun on my shoulders, welcoming the tide. Building, rebuilding. Playfully. Lightly. Never changing. Always changing.”

I do not like this act of leaving, because I do not like change. I do not know if anyone truly does. 

But even with the washing away of my identity as a McCaskey student, there is something deeper that cannot be washed away or changed, by graduation or anything else beyond it.

That deeper thing is gratitude. 

For the people, the challenges, and the friendships. The failures and the tears. 

At McCaskey I have learned so much: from what it means to make mistakes and grow from them, to the value of inclusion and care.

So…without further adieu:

So long, and thanks for all the fish.