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Summerhill School

Summerhill School

Of Journeys and Goodbyes

Charlie Jeavons, Editor-in-Chief and creator of the Constellation, with a message of goodbye.

Going to school is like when your mum buys you a pair of shoes that don’t quite fit and saying, “You’ll grow into them.”  In Year 7 you rumble around the hallways, trying (futilely) to find your place, your position, yourself.  At this point your shoes are too big.

Year 8 flies past – your shoes fit a little better now – and you’re ‘dossing’ (let’s face it, in Year 8 you’re still finding yourself).  Year 9, you think you have found your identity, your shoes fit completely, life is swell.  Up comes Year 10 to sweep you off your growing feet – one year to go!

Panic, excitement, a cacophony of emotions that just don’t work because all of a sudden you’re in Year 11.  Your shoes are too tight and you cannot wait to get out of them.  You finish and you discard them under your bed – until you think upon them, subsequently, considering your time at school.

Truth be told, I don’t fit here anymore.  I have dreams and blinding ambition – a need for personal expression and I’m afraid I must kill this darling – school.

It’s been interesting, ineffable in so many ways.  Ups and downs and thrashing to find a voice.  However, my legacy, my Mind’s Child, is born of imagination and free-will.

To quote Pink Floyd, “We’re just two lost souls, swimming in a fish bowl, year after year.”  And my small bowl is full of memories.  The Constellation was created for freedom and whilst I believe that, ‘in freedom most people find sin’, in freedom, some people find themselves.

I trust that Daniel Martin, our new editor will continue this work and make sure that we all have a free voice.

We all move on and progress – whether I have a choice in the matter or not – but it’s about time to fly the coop (forgive me, I am succumbing to cliché now).

I have proven that I’m more than expected.  As a student I’ve gone above and beyond and if I am being deadly serious with you, I still don’t have a clue what I’m going to do with my life, but I know that ‘a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies; the man who doesn’t read lives only one.’

Bittersweet.

Something I love, I must leave, when I want to leave but not leave it.

 

Charlie Jeavons

Editor-in-Chief and creator of the Constellation

Summerhill Class of 2019