As you could probably deduce from my title, this is a farewell column, and it is my fifth draft. Four drafts preceded this farewell column.

First came the bitter one, where I tried to point out some of the problems I saw within the culture of LT and remind people that we aren’t as connected as our “Play as a Team” slogan would suggest. It was a miserable piece of writing, and I didn’t even really mean most of it. I was just trying to be different from the usually cheery farewell column.

Then came the second draft, in which I tried to soften the blows of the first draft. Yet it still remained miserable, only it was more boring. Was this what my experience at LT brought me? Misery and resentment? I didn’t think that was the case, but reading the column, it felt like that.

The third draft praised every institution remotely involved with LT. It felt forced, and I found myself writing it just to convince myself my experience at LT was 100% positive.

The fourth draft was a second attempt at convincing myself that LT was super great. I praised all of my classmates and thanked the teachers for every second they spent in creating my high school experience. This still felt forced. Somehow my heart wasn’t in writing any of these personal columns.

So here is my fifth draft, which so far is just me telling you about all my failed miserable drafts. It probably seems like I’ve lost all direction and am trying to fill in the spaces of a botched farewell column. But that’s not true. Or at least, it’s not completely true. The point of sharing all of my failed attempts, all of my forced misery and forced cheeriness, is to be honest. I want you to see my process, understand my thoughts.

I did reach a final thought, however: farewell columns are stupid. Of course, I could have told you this at the start of my process, but I didn’t fully comprehend it at that point. I saw these farewell columns where people attempted to take high school, wrap it in its nicest bow and say “That was high school. Wasn’t it awesome?” I tried to take high school, wrap it in a bunch of toilet paper, and say, “Well, you just went through high school. Wasn’t it awful?” just to be different. Both were awful to read: they weren’t honest, both were forced and frankly a waste of words.

That’s because you can’t put four years of your life into words. If I could, I would fully expect to have magazines, publishing companies and film studios begging me to forget about college and jump right into the business. I love words and consider myself adept at phrasing things so that I might have a chance of capturing just a moment, an emotion or a person. Even the best pieces of art can only do so much in capturing life. Pictures can beautifully capture the complex emotions of a single second, but could they capture all of the anguish and joy of the years surrounding that image? Unlikely. Even the best music only presents a template of emotions, one where we can personally cut and paste our lives so the song “speaks to us.”

So, here’s your farewell column: Goodbye. There is no farewell column. Thanks for everything. High school contained some of the most joyous times in my life, and it contained some of my darkest moments. That’s life. And in the end, there’s nothing more beautiful that that simple truth. This is life. That was high school. Wasn’t it awesome/awful/boring/beautiful/heart-breaking/engaging/depressing/uplifting/useless/unforgettable/just a bit of life?