We’ve all heard the term “peaked in high school.” Maybe you’ve recognized this behaviour in adults in your life, and silently made fun of them, or you’ve been scared to death to become one of those people who talks about the “golden years.”

While the cliche is not universal, a loss of identity is something that can affect everyone. There are a lot of scary things about leaving high school, like having to leave your parents and childhood home, having to find new friends at college, or entering the workforce. 

But an even scarier part about the transition is losing your sense of identity because you didn’t use your classes and extracurriculars correctly in order to build a real one in the first place.

We’re all collecting activities and accolades like infinity stones. We build our everyday lives around clubs, sports, AP classes and more. Maybe it’s for college applications, or maybe it’s because our lives revolve around high school, and it’s the only way we know how to build our identity, and figure out who we are. 

The issue with this mindset is that these extrinsic identities don’t represent who we truly are. When you leave high school, they disappear almost instantly.

Most people aren’t going to play their sport competitively after school, you’re not going to see your high school friend group for lunch everyday, and the clubs you were in don’t exist anymore — or if they do, the culture you knew may have shifted. 

Participating in activities in high school is still good. It’s just the way we let the titles define us that is unhealthy. 

Continue to participate in those experiences, but instead of letting the simple fact that you are the leader of an activity define your identity, let what you took away from it define who you are.

Instead of defining yourself as a varsity starter on the basketball team, define yourself as a team player that performs well under pressure and has a passion for basketball. Feel free to take part in club sports at college or crush your friends in some pickup. 

Your basketball skills still matter, but you won’t be able to define yourself by them forever. In high school your entire life might be the basketball team, but for the rest of your life, it won’t be.

Rather than seeing yourself as the president of Student Council, see yourself as someone who can lead and inspire others. While it’s great to love the things you started doing in high school, you shouldn’t place your worth in a title.

You’re going to go a lot of places in life, through high school, through college, through different jobs and internships, through different cities and homes. 

In order to be happy and successful, your self-worth and identity cannot be dependent on your environment or the people around you because those things are usually not permanent. If you let your character depend on where you are physically or who surrounds you, and then those factors change, what do you have left?

It’s not that your identity itself will never change; temporary experiences and environments like high school will and should have an impact on your identity. As your life experiences shape you, you’ll acquire skills, make memories, lose trust, and gain perspective — but all of these things are tied to who you are, nothing else.

So now, while you’re still in high school and have the comfort of your various titles and roles, try and define yourself differently, or — if you’re feeling extra brave — stop trying to define yourself at all. Rather, create, cultivate, and explore the person you want to be. 

Let your activities, clubs, sports, and extracurriculars become a tool for developing your identity rather than becoming the identity itself.

The unsigned editorial represents the opinion of the Editorial Board, which consists of the majority of student editorial staff listed on this page.