The notes have been read, my uniform is ironed and granny has lit the candle. Consider this my farewell, my final parting epitaph as I embrace the great wide yonder and face my long-awaited State exams.
A lament is something we Irish write all too well, and this one you read today is written by a student who – at this very moment – sits in a nondescript exam hall somewhere in the leafy south Dublin sprawl.
Most likely I am staring at a ticking clock wondering how on earth to compose a coherent set of thoughts for my personal essay for English paper one.
Furious scribbling
The air brims with all that you’d expect: fear, worries and the furious scribbling of many a blue ballpoint pen bought as a frantic afterthought in the local garage not 40 minutes ago.
When I proclaim this piece to be a lament, what I truly mean is that it marks an ending, both in mine and, indeed, 50-odd thousand other young people’s lives across the country.
It’s an end to the familiar. School is over, and it would seem that real life, “so permanent, blank and true” as Philip Larkin once said (no prizes for guessing what I’m praying for on paper two), is hurtling our way.
Gone is the ignorance, blissful and magnificent while it lasted. No more are the days when we could only imagine what the Leaving Cert might have in store for us. Now, at this moment, there is no quashing such fervent anxiety with the notion that all of the above is “absolutely ages away!’’
It’s here, it’s real and – according to what we’ve been told by all you enlightened elders – it is of the utmost importance.
Therefore, I am left wondering how on earth will I ever live without it? Its looming shadow has grown to be a comfortable presence in my life while its spectre follows passively if not faithfully.
Like a textbook example of Stockholm Syndrome I must come to terms with the startling truth that in just over two week's time, my drive, my ambition and perhaps even my own purpose in life will be exactly that, my own.
You might ask why do I lament this new beginning? Should I not embrace my tomorrow and dance in the rain, carpe-ing each and every diem?
What if my answer simply was that, yes, I should do all of these wonderfully typical things, but no, I shouldn’t have to do it all so soon. I shouldn’t have to leave behind the comfort and the routine because things like that are hard; I shouldn’t have to push myself because that takes real effort; and I most certainly should not have to prove my worth in this world through two weeks of exams (because that sounds admittedly rather difficult).
Pink box
Yet today, as I come to the end of that first ever paper, basking in the many sighs of relief around me, and write my exam number in that fabulous pink box, you can bet I’ll be glad I had to.
I shall be glad I was pushed to my limits and shoved to take these first few steps. I will be glad to have cried my tears and begrudgingly realised real life cares not for petty objections.
No matter how much we may criticise and deride the grim companion of the Leaving Cert, we cannot deny its ruthless efficiency in teaching us about what it means to have your misgivings, voice your outrage, then knuckle down and do it anyway.
As you bite your tongue, sing your lament and entertain the possibility that just because you shouldn’t doesn’t mean you couldn’t. Therefore I would like to wish my fellow martyrs good luck: that we may do these exams fearlessly, tirelessly and – let’s hope – only once.
