I can vividly remember my first moments with the Sion community. Cheer camp over the summer. I met the first person from my grade, Denali Sanchez, at Pinstripes bowling alley the July before school started. My first days, filled with excitement and nerves, were a beautiful blur of shy introductions and small smiles at newly found mutual interests. I just remember thinking to myself, “I never thought I would’ve ended up here.”
Despite my immediate rejection of the thought now, for most of my grade and middle school years, I was intent on attending St. Teresa’s Academy, not because I particularly loved what they offered, but because it was where everyone went. Going into my 8th grade year at St. Ann’s, I was adamant that come the following year, I would match my classmates in a red blazer and plaid skirt, taking my first steps into St. Teresa’s.
That fall, my mother sent me to shadow at Sion. After visiting for a day, and finding the community and classes appealing and exciting, I consequently made the decision (with my parents, of course) to take a step away from my classmates and into a brand new place. I was only attending Sion with one other student from my grade school. The majority of the class went off to St. Teresa’s.
I remember the anticipation filling me the summer before I started my freshman year. I wasn’t particularly close with anyone from my gradeschool, but the thought of going to a completely new school with almost no connections was, while exciting, intimidating. Would I find friends? What if no one likes me? Can I be myself? This thought process is one that goes through countless freshmen’s minds in their first days, even months, in high school, especially when there are few or no other previous classmates.
Sion students come from a plethora of different middle schools all around the Kansas City area, so the apprehensiveness of going into your freshman year with almost no one you know is one that many students can relate to. However, although going into a new school alone can be vulnerable, in my time at Sion I’ve come to find it also as an opportunity for connection and growth.
Through the inability to lean back into comfort and old stability, you gain the ability to build confidence in yourself, when you otherwise might not have. By learning to step outside my comfort zone to talk to new people, express my own interests, and connect with the grades around me, I have been able to fill my time at Sion with people I truly care about, as well as become more self-assured in my own skin. It can be difficult to come into a school feeling alone and sometimes even out of place, but through dwelling in the discomfort and continuing to progress through it, you may find yourself coming out the other side a stronger person.
