It was the beginning of my junior year in a new school, and the only person I knew was my younger brother. Although, I did keep a close knit circle of friends for the past five years of my life, coming out of my shell to meet new people was not my forte. Therefore, I was not much of a socialite last year or any year at that, so that school year had to be my year. I wanted to reinvent myself since I didn't know anyone, and that’s exactly what I did or at least I think I did. A few nights before classes I browsed the school’s website to see if there were any activities and clubs that I could immediately be apart of. It was kind of a fail, due to the school’s choice of including the millions of sports team instead of the other clubs that I was sure they offered.

However, I did stumble upon the tons of electives and found some that stook out to me. Like, band, art, and musical theatre. But, since I had my brother looking over my shoulder, browsing the classes together. He strongly persisted that we should take a class together, and I of course said yes, for some odd reason. It took us twenty minutes to semi-agree on a class, but my brother being the sore loser he was, I ended up choosing yearbook for his sake instead of musical theatre. Being the ‘it’s the end of the world’ type teen I was, I stomped out the room and ignored my brother until our extremely long walk to school the next morning.Therefore, because of that decision, I dreaded my first day of school, all I could think about was how I was supposed to reinvent myself for the new academic year. Instead, I was already going to be apart of class I knew I would not enjoy.

So, there we were in yearbook,my younger brother and I, with our unplanned matching green collared shirts ironed to the crisp from the night before, our large kinky afros that could easily be traced into one huge circle which had almost touched the wall that stood behind us and our attention not focusing on anyone but each other, because we were both new and did not know anyone yet. We were attached to each other as always, sometimes people thought that we were twins. Which was weird since we did not look alike whatsoever, however everyone assumed so, because we both wore glasses and would always be seen together.

At first like any teen cliche movie, I didn’t give a damn about yearbook. Not only that I didn’t give a damn, the whole entire class appeared to not give a damn either. Our teacher seemed like she was all over the place about explaining things. Therefore, no one really paid attention to her. I found out that yearbook was actually a class where you could walk around the school during other classes, and pretend that you’re covering an event and if any teacher/ and or school security would stop you, all you had to do was flash them a lanyard that said press pass on it and they’ll just let you roam around.

Yearbook was supposed to be a meaningless elective, that seemed interesting on paper. But ended up being a total bore in reality. However, two months in of covering events, changed my outlook on the class, and here I am today writing about a community that I was part of and actually felt heard in.

I discovered that I actually loved to write and interview people, I’m referring to covering events. I also loved taking pictures, which goes in hand of covering events. so, the community I’m choosing is yearbook.You know what I honestly think it was the feeling of exhilar. I got when I wrote my first piece and it was published in the school’s magazine as a teaser. It was an advertising technique we used to get people to buy the yearbook.

 

As, I got deeper into the school year, so did the yearbook deadline to submit the pages. There were 366 pages to submit and not a lot of time to do this, due to there not being a stable and reliable team to help out.

Now, that I cared about yearbook, it was the time to build a reliable team, out of what i hoped to include all 160 students from the yearbook class population. However, we only got 30 students to contribute to the cause. My brother was in of course on building, and we mostly reached out to our friends in the class. Then, we made flyers and asked the other communications teachers, who taught tv production, newspaper, and literary magazine to hand them out. Our strategy somewhat was a success, even though there were only 30 of us, we made it work and assigned each other to positions based on our interests. The main roles given were, sports, clubs, senior activities, ads, editing, proofreading, and design. I was the co-editor in chief and my brother was the editor in chief. So, even if I wanted to escape the craze of deadlines in yearbook, my brother would always bring it up.

Genres we interacted with were writing about events that took place in school and taking pictures of the events as well. In retrospect I didn’t necessarily felt like I was being heard using my voice, but more of being heard on paper when I wrote my opinion pieces for the school’s magazine, which was also part of yearbook. More or less I was also being heard when I would instruct the newbies on how to properly take pictures and cover events.

Being part of yearbook was such a pivotal moment for me, I would spend nights and weekends putting all of my energy towards editing pages. Most of my attention for the last two years of high school was geared toward yearbook, due to the team that was build and the friendships that were created. Yearbook, was fun, stressful, and at the end sad because I didn't want to leave my amazing staff.