senior pictures

The World Turned Upside Down ~ The Story of the Class of 2020

I graduated high school in 1998. The world had been laid at my feet, whether I knew it or not at that time, and I was preparing to step over the edge and enter “adulting”. Officially.

But first, I got to experience the requisite rites of passage afforded to most Seniors during their last year of high school.
I went to my prom. We didn’t stay very long. I wore a vintage black dress a la Courtney Love, my idol at the time. Yeah. I was 17. I thought I looked pretty dope (we said dope then).
We took our final tests. My friends got their college acceptance packages back before all of that was done online.
We compared ACT test scores and some of us attended or played our last football, basketball, or soccer games. (Not this girl. I was more of the “skip the pep rally to go sit a IHOP and drink copious amounts of coffee” type).
We walked across the stage, we switched our tassels, we bid farewell to people we felt like we had known forever.

We probably felt like our world was being turned upside down.

This year’s graduating seniors were born in 2001/2002/2003….right on the heels of 9/11. A time when everything changed for our country. For the world. They don’t know of or remember a time when you could bid farewell to your loved ones at an airline gate. When you didn’t have to bother taking your shoes off at security They don’t know what it was like to watch that disaster live on television and feel utterly helpless. They don’t recall the somber cloud that hung over the country for years following.

Everything for them was post-9/11

Now, here we are. We find ourselves in a world TRULY turned upside down. No one, unless they are very, very old, has lived through a time like this before. Where everything has ground to a halt. Where the rites of passage afforded to millions of kids over the years have been stripped away. Where all we have now is uncertainty and questions.

I didn’t know it then, but the Seniors I photographed last year will always be a special group. They are the kids who didn’t get the walk across the stage, didn’t get to dance at their prom, didn’t get to perform in that final school musical, and will NEVER forget what it was like to lose all of that.

These are the post-9/11 kids living through COVID-19. Their world turned upside down. The stories they will have to tell will be incredible. Because someday this will just be a story you pass down to your kids when you want them to realize how freaking lucky they are that THEY’RE not quarantined with their whole family in one house for weeks with no end in sight. This is gonna be your “I walked 20 miles in the snow each way to school and back” story. This is your “Grandma lived through the Depression and that’s why she pickles pigs feet” tale.

It gives me a small amount of comfort to know that someday, hopefully soon, this will all just be in the past and be a story we tell.

So I wanted to just celebrate this special group here. Congratulations to Sara, Olivia, Lauren, Ryan, Josh, Grace, Spencer, Maiya, Craig, and Sophie. I wish you SO much luck in the future!