Oh No, Your High School Yearbook is Going to Live Online Forever
It's something unpredictable but in the end it's nightmare-inducing, I hope you had the time of your life (because you're never using the internet ever again).
As we go on, we remember all the cringy photos we took together. Yes, your worst nightmares have in fact become reality: your high school yearbook will live on the internet long after you've taken your last breath in this life.
The Boston Globe recently released a story that covered the Library of the Commonwealth reaching out to towns and cities soliciting for anything they deemed necessary to preserve. What they anticipated was boxes of old ship's logs and historic letters, but what they received were carloads of yearbooks, deemed the most valuable pieces of history in the libraries due to the amount of people coming into the libraries and renting them.
Now, generations of internet users will be able to know that you "couldn't have been able to do this without your parents and your BFF Jenny," even though you and Jenny haven't spoke to each other since that incident happened in college. Or how proud your children will feel when they see your photo in the yearbook with the superlative "Most Flirtatious" written under it.
Personally, I embrace this decision. Don't get me wrong, I cringe anytime my friends pull out our old Dighton-Rehoboth Class of 2011 yearbook. Seventeen-year-old Bryan thought sideburns was a good look and spent his weekends dressed in a felt falcon mascot costume.
Do I hate every aspect of who I was in high school? Of course I do. But so does everyone else. That what high school is about--finding out what you don't like about yourself, so you can change before the real world hits you.
Embrace your blunder years, because some people weren't fortunate enough to escape them.