Two years ago, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a columnist.

It was a role I took on reluctantly: The perspectives editors of the time couldn’t find anybody willing to write the traditional senior goodbye column, so they saddled me — a sophomore with no senior friends and little knowledge of the Class of ’13 — with the assignment. I wasted hours staring at a blank page on Microsoft Word. I bothered the management team members with questions about what made their class unique. I agonized over 600 words that refused to come to me.

In that way, I was forced into what would become one of my greatest passions, something that, although I have credentials and awards to show for it, I love most because it allows me to express my thoughts and ideas in a way that might make an impact on the world around me.

Now, as they say, I have come full circle. In the context of the senior goodbye column, I have transformed from a timid sophomore with her first assignment into a senior myself, bidding farewell not to strangers but to the school I have spent four years attending and the people who have been there with me. There exists a certain poetry in the situation, a pattern that implies a lesson to be learned.

The moral of the story as I see it is, though a bit cliché, an eternal and ubiquitous truth: Do not allow your fears and inhibitions to hold you back; do not let the comfort of being good dissuade you from daring to be great.

We are the class that, on one Blue Day in our freshman year, paused as somebody came over the intercom to make an announcement: It was 11:11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 2011. We are the class that formed excited huddles in our classrooms as the once-in-a-lifetime moment approached. We are the class that wished harder than we’d ever wished before — for good grades and dream schools, for new skills and opportunities, for wealth, for world peace, for love, for happiness, a host of different wishes — yet we, a group of 1,200 unique people bound by the hallways and classrooms and memories we share, wished together.

Our years in high school have come to an end, and it is now clear that wishing is not enough.

“If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so,” author and journalist Lev Grossman writes in The Magicians. As we walk away from CHS for the last time, we need to embrace the present as the time to stop wishing and start putting our dreams into action. We have intelligence and ability; we have curiosity and creativity; we have passion and dedication. Within ourselves, we must find the courage to take these things, the tools we have at our disposal, and use them to shape not only our futures but the world around us.

The time is now. This is it.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Kyle Walker at [email protected].