Yearbooks Evoke an Inevitable Nostalgia

It is almost impossible not to feel at least a little nostalgic looking through high school yearbooks. Regardless of our experiences growing up, regardless of how fun or frustrating our school years were, when we look back on them there's always something about those memories that are special.

The high school years aren't easy. For everybody, the immense physical, emotional, and intellectual changes that we go through during that time keep us off balance. We're expected to act grown up because we're starting to look like adults, but we're still kids at heart, more interested in play than anything else. We're emotionally and financially tied to our parents, but we're also straining for our freedom.

Even though our memories of high school revolve around friends, the experience is heavily focused on competition as well. We each choose what is important to us. An athlete might aspire to make the starting line on the football team. A smart kid might aspire to get into a good school. Whatever objective we choose, we're not the only ones, and we lock ourselves into competition with everybody else who's pursuing the same goal. To make matters worse, dominance drives emerge for the first time during puberty, so for the first time we are aware of hierarchies. Inevitably, once we're aware of them we want to be on top.

There is also fierce competition between the groups of people pursuing each objective. The kids on the starting line think football is important; the kids on the Honor Roll think grades are important. Anybody who invests heavily in reaching the goal they set for themselves also invests him- or herself in the idea that the goal is worthy and is, in fact, more worthy than any other goal.

Competition aside, high school is a time for big dreams and plans for the future. Nearly every high school couple discusses getting married and having kids, regardless of how impractical that outcome really is. High school athletes dream of getting to the big leagues. Drama geeks dream of landing a big movie role. Class leaders dream of successful business careers or political aspirations. It is a time for feeding the ambition that will carry us into our future.

Life after high school rarely bears much resemblance to the plans we made in our teens. We soon discover that life is more about great obstacles than it is about great expectations. We find that our high school sweetheart, sweet as he or she may be, is just one fish in a sea full of fish. Unpredictable events change our direction dramatically, which is sometimes to our benefit and sometimes to our detriment, but which rarely takes us on the course we envisioned. We change our ambitions and our tactics as we stop imagining the life we will lead and start to live the life we're given.

Our teenage years are a unique time, and who we are then is a unique version of ourselves, which we leave behind as we progress into adulthood. Over time, that part of us that was so vibrantly and awkwardly alive fades. We set aside the elements of our personalities that don't fit into the regimented lives we lead. Our grand illusions break off, and we live in the real world instead.

Still, that time and those parts of ourselves are not gone entirely. The things that were important to us - our friends, our goals, our dreams - are all captured to some extent in our high school yearbooks. That's what makes those volumes so special. We keep them so we don't forget who we were when we started.