Goodbye, my friends

One for the album: Lydia (front row, first from left) with her classmates at the end of their SPM exams.

FRANKLY, when I began secondary school, I loathed it.

I was a 13-year-old with barely any social skills, far away from the Selangor state I once called home and separated from my primary school friends.

Yet I found myself shedding a few tears on the last day of my secondary schooling at SMK Taman Daya 1 in Pasir Gudang, Johor, where I have settled down for the past five years.

To say the last few years of my secondary school life were akin to a rollercoaster would be an understatement.

One moment my friends and I were celebrating the end of our 2019 Form Three Assessment (PT3) exams in Melaka, the next we were confined to our homes, only seeing each other via a digital screen.

Starting Form Four at a time when the world was grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic was definitely not something any of us could have seen coming.

Nevertheless, after two-and-a-half drawn-out years in which my friends and I relied heavily on a whole lot of perseverance and determination, we can finally say that we have graduated from secondary school. I’m glad and grateful to have spent the majority of my schooling life surrounded by my amazing classmates and friends.

Every single moment with them has given me something in life, be it a bright memory to treasure forever, or a bitter lesson to learn from.

We had our ups and downs, our joyous days and our fallouts, yet I wouldn’t go back and change a thing.

Towards the final months of school, it did not really feel like we were graduating soon, since we had already spent months apart doing online learning.

It was easy to forget that it would all be over in a matter of months, then weeks and eventually, a few days.

Then came our Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) exams, which we managed to complete successfully despite the uncertainties and disruptions brought on by the pandemic.

I have immense admiration and appreciation for my teachers for helping us so much along the way as we prepared for arguably the most important exams of our lives.

They encouraged us to keep going even when they were struggling to teach us following the shift to the online mode.

The four weeks of the SPM exams and even the months leading up to them were some of the most stressful time of my life.

I struggled between cramming in time for revision and getting an extra hour or two of sleep. Despite the latter usually winning, it was impossible to not feel extremely exhausted.

The day of my final paper was bittersweet – after wrestling with a gruelling subject that was Additional Mathematics, most of us were relieved that the exams were over for good.

As rain clouds filled the sky, we gathered around to take a few photographs before we went home.

We had taken many class photographs over the last few months but this time, it felt somewhat more special. Saying goodbye to everyone was by far the hardest part.

I’m proud to have graduated alongside people whom I will cherish for a lifetime.

My secondary school experience would not have meant as much without them by my side. I wish them all the best as we go our separate ways in pursuing the next chapter of our lives.

Lydia, 18, a student in Johor, is a participant of the BRATs Young Journalist Programme run by The Star’s Newspaper-in-Education (Star-NiE) team.