My High School Experience Elloquently Written by Kate Chopin

“There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to “feed upon opinion” when her own soul had invited her.” (127)

Personally, this passage speaks to me in a way that I rarely find with assigned books. I know that this might be a rather informal comparison, especially when Kate Chopin has so eloquently written it, but this seems to sum up my entire high school experience into one paragraph.

When I first came to Severn, I tried to conform into being one of the “popular” kids and tried to have, or what I thought was, a typical high school experience, much like Edna Pontellier did in the beginning of the novel with her husband and family. However during this period of my life, I was the unhappy with myself and with my surroundings. Of course I still pushed myself in the classroom because that’s just my personality, but outside of my courses, I felt like I had no purpose, or as if I was just fulfilling the footsteps of everyone before me and not forging my own path. Whilst reading The Awakening I detected the same exact feeling from Edna.

However, at the end of my sophomore year, I joined the sailing team, which was very atypical for someone in my family who was born and bred playing lacrosse. Here, although I believe it is the road less travelled by at Severn, I found my niche. Just as Edna found passion in her art, I found passion in my sailing. But more so than most sports, sailing is extremely time consuming and because of that I slowly began to distance myself from my “popular” friends towards my newfound sailing friends, which many would consider lowering myself on the social ladder. However, simultaneously I began to feel like I found my place. Every step which I took toward relieving myself from the conformity of high school added to my strength and expansion as an individual. Instead of looking at high school through the eyes of my siblings and my peers, I began to make my own decisions about high school and about life in general. I began to look with my own eyes, just as Edna, and I began to develop my own views of the world and of my surroundings rather than to just listen and accept the views of those around me.

In all honesty, I was pleasantly surprised by this novel and the ease with which I could relate to the characters, especially Edna. I admire the courage that is found in Edna with her defiance of the social norms and in Kate Chopin for writing such a controversial novel for her time period, especially when it destroyed her career. I aspire to one day reach that level of bravery in whatever I end up doing in my life; I hope to challenge the norms and find my calling, no matter how disruptive it is to society just as both of these women did in the late 19^th century.