My sophomore year, I walked into the swimming pool locker room with my girls by my side and a swagger to my step. Unlike a majority of S.C. students, the idea of the pool unit neither frightened nor bothered me. If anything, I was excited. I had always been a strong swimmer, I had some of my best friends with me in class, and the cherry on top of it all was my brand new $75 Speedo swimsuit which I was looking forward to wearing.

I strutted up to the gym locker I had established as mine the day prior, casually tore off the lock I had left open for the purpose of saving time and I stared into my empty locker. My empty locker. Empty meaning that my swim cap, the towel, everything I had just put in the locker the day before was gone. Including the brand new swimsuit.

I had to watch my friends swim that first day of class, and suppress tears as I imagined my mom’s volatile reaction to my carelessness. I should have known better.

Fast forward exactly two years later, and here I am now: a big, mighty, seemingly invincible senior… who still has yet to learn from her mistakes.

On Jan. 15, I brought a high quality, expensive camera (the property of LION newspaper) to school to take photos for the upcoming issue of the school newspaper. Due to the fact that I never stop at my locker throughout the day, I decided to carry the camera with me throughout the school, and deliver it to back to my teacher by eighth period. Amidst studying for a math test, texting my friends to see what the weekend plans were and the rest of the swirling thoughts firing off in my overactive, forgetful brain, I left my lunch study hall period with no camera strapped to my side.    Come eighth period, and a panic seized me when I noticed that the camera was absent from my hip, and I recalled the similar experience I had in sophomore year gym class with the missing, never-to-be-returned swimsuit. To nobody’s surprise, the camera was not to be returned by a good samaritan. It had been stolen.

The moral of my stupidity is this: Despite the handful of genuinely good people out there, humans are inherently bad in general and if you have something valuable and you are out in public, it does not matter how comfortable you are in that environment, or how well you think you know the people around you: you should always watch your stuff and not be an idiot like me. This being said, it still comes as a shock to my system when I look around my study hall and see all the kids who I share a learning environment with, share my community with and have shared the past four years of my life with, and try and envision one of them doing something for their own benefit that just destroyed another person’s weekend and hard earned money. I don’t expect whoever took the camera to return it, just like I figured out I shouldn’t have expected my swimsuit to turn up either. I accept full responsibility for my thoughtlessness and understand that both are gone.

However, I would like to ask the Lyons Township student body to think of a time that they lost something, something important, and remember the dreadful, sinking feeling that accompanied the loss, and to reflect on that emotion before taking other people’s belongings. We are LT. We are Hooligans, we are Weirdos and we are the Lions. We are a school to be proud of. We are not a school of criminals.