The Memory that Refuses to Fade: A Prom Night to Remember

I still get chills thinking about it - the feeling of standing on the dance floor, surrounded by people staring at us, with my partner and our friends dancing around us. It was as if time stood still, and all that mattered was the moment we were in. We were like two peas in a pod, swaying to the music, smiling at each other, and just enjoying the sheer exhilaration of it all.

It's funny how some moments can be etched into your memory forever, even years after they happen. In my case, it was prom night - a moment that I will always treasure. I remember feeling like a kid again, like I had finally achieved something that I had always dreamed of. The music started playing, and we took to the dance floor, lost in our own little world. My partner, who is 6 feet tall, towered over me, and I was just a petite little girl in heels - but in that moment, it didn't matter. We were both on cloud nine.

I have to admit, I've never been one for the spotlight. In fact, I've always felt more comfortable behind the scenes. But when we took to that dance floor, all eyes were on us. It was like a giant circle of people staring at us, and it made me feel so uncomfortable - like I just wanted to hide under a rock. But then something magical happened. My other best friend came over and joined us, followed by her date, and before long, everyone else started dancing with us too. The energy on the dance floor was electric, and we were all caught up in the moment, lost in our own little bubble of happiness.

Looking back, I realize just how much this night meant to me. It wasn't just about being prom queen - although that was definitely a bonus. It was about feeling like I had accomplished something that I had always wanted, even if it seemed like an impossible dream. As a child, I used to look at pictures of people wearing tiaras and crowns, and I would think to myself, "One day, I want to be just like them." And now, here I was, standing on the dance floor, holding my own tiara, feeling like the coolest kid in school.

But what's even more profound is that this experience taught me a valuable lesson about believing in myself. As a high school student, it's easy to get caught up in doubts and fears - to wonder if you'll ever achieve your goals or if you're good enough. But standing on that dance floor, surrounded by my friends and feeling like we were unstoppable, reminded me of the power of hard work and determination. If two misfit kids like us could accomplish something as seemingly impossible as becoming prom king and queen, then anything is possible.

So to all of my fellow high school students out there who are struggling to find their place or doubting their abilities, I want to remind you that it's okay to feel lost or uncertain. But don't let those feelings hold you back from chasing your dreams. Remember that you have the power to make a difference, and that even the most seemingly impossible goals can be achieved with hard work and determination.

As for me, prom night was just one of many memories that I've accumulated over the years - but it's definitely one that I'll never forget. It's a reminder that sometimes, all it takes is a little bit of courage and a willingness to take risks to achieve greatness. So go out there and make your own prom night memories - who knows what the future holds?

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys it's Hannah and today I'm coming to you with a video that's a bit different than the videos that I regularly do so today I'm going to be talking about the one memory that I would never want to forget and the idea for this video was inspired by the novel The One memory of Flora banks by Emily bar and this book is coming out this may this video is being sponsored by penguin teens so thank you so so much to them for sponsoring this video and for sending this book my way and also for coming up with this very cool idea the one memory of Flora Banks follows the story of this girl named Flora who at age 10 had a brain tumor removed and as a result of that surgery she was left with anterograde amnesia I think that's how you'd pronounce that essentially what that means is she doesn't have a short-term memory so she can remember things for maybe like an hour or two but after that she loses those memories she remembers like who her parents are and how to do like basic things because she has all of her memories from before she was 10 years old but ever since having that surgery she has trouble creating new memories the plot really takes off when Flora ends up kissing Drake her best friend Paige's boyfriend friend and for whatever reason this memory actually sticks the next day when she wakes up she still remembers kissing Drake and that's something that never really happens for her since she has trouble creating new memories that's all I can really say for the plot of this book without getting into too many spoilers but now I want to get into a bit of a review I was really intrigued by the premise of this book I thought it was a really fascinating idea and I'm the type of person who really likes to explore a character in depth so I thought that being able to explore a character like this and be inside of their mind would be really interesting and I wasn't disappointed in that aspect at all the book is written in a very choppy and repetitive way and that might be a turnoff for some people but personally I really enjoyed it because I thought that it was very fitting for the way that Flora herself was thinking she will do something or write something down or something will happen and she remembers it in the moment and of course like 10 15 minutes later she still remembers but then the next day comes around or even a couple hours later come around and she just doesn't remember what has happened so the narration ends up repeating things that we already know about but they're things that Flora doesn't remember so for that reason it can feel a little bit disjointed but I thought that it was such a unique aspect to this book and something I've never seen before Flora spends the majority of this book trying to find Drake because she remembers kissing him and then she thinks that she's in love with him so it is pretty install lovey in that sense I am not a fan of insta love at all and the fact that she kind of thought for the majority of this book that Drake had cured her in some sort of way wasn't something that I was the biggest fan of but without giving any spoilers away the plot has much more to it than that characters do tend to get pretty annoying Flora herself kind of has the mind of a 10-year-old sometimes because that's where most of her memories have stuck so you can get a bit frustrated with her as you're reading this but personally I like unlikable characters and I really enjoyed that aspect of it so that was actually kind of fun for me to read overall I ended up giving this a three out of five stars I thought it had like I said a very very cool premise and I thought that the writing style was really interesting and the fact that you got to be so in-depth in a character's head was really fun for me but we do spend a majority of this book dealing with the insta love which is something that is very hard for me to get past and I also thought that the way that her parents treated her and some of the other characters treated her in this book wasn't the best thing in the world and I just really wasn't into a lot of that so it wasn't my favorite thing in that sense but overall it was a very gripping book for me and I read it so so quickly because I really just wanted to know how it was going to end so since Flora's story surrounds memory and the one memory that she ends up holding on to I'm going to be talking about the one memory that I would never want to forget so this is kind of like a story time is video but I'm really excited to tell you guys about this memory because I think it's a really fun one so when I found out that I'd be doing this video I was racking my brain trying to figure out what one memory I would have to choose out of all of my memories and I thought about it for a long time and I was thinking of going with something about my family or like my friends obviously like I don't ever want to let go of any memories I have of my family and my friends but when I was thinking through this I realized there is one memory that stands out to me kind of above all of my other ones but it was the night that I won prom queen my senior year of high school so let me get a little bit into this story because there are a lot of components to it so throughout my entire childhood and my middle school and high school life I was not a popular kid I was very nerdy I was really shy awkward uncomfortable I had a close-knit group of friends but that was only because all of us were exactly the same awkward shy nerdy weird kid kids essentially if you need help placing it just think of the show Glee my friends were basically all of the kids in glee club minus anyone who was popular that's who we were we were the awkward nerdy theater kids who loved singing and walked down the hall singing musical theater we were not fun to be around and I totally understand why we weren't cool but ever since I was a little kid and from the influence of watching a million Disney Channel original movies I always had this dream of becoming prom queen but it was never something I really admitted to myself or to anybody else because it was kind of like a pipe dream it was never going to happen but I always just fantasized about it because like I feel like it would just be fun to wear a tiara on your head you know just once and that was back in like my elementary school and middle school days where I had like never plucked my eyebrows and I thought I was cool for like rolling down my Uggs it was just not a pretty time you don't want pictures and I've burned them all anyway so but then as I got into high school I'd kind of accepted my status as one of the weird theater kids and the whole dream of becoming like popular or cool was kind of out the window because it was never going to happen at this point the other thing you have to understand about my high school is that I went to a high school with like 500 or 600 kids everyone knew everyone we all went to elementary school together to middle school together and high school together like we had grown up with each other and we all knew each other and it was a very uncomfortable situation watching everyone go through puberty so because of this in high school there were like clicks and there were the popular kids and the other kids but there was never really any animosity between the two groups mostly the way that my school ended up becoming divided was the people who took AP classes and then the people who didn't take AP classes and I ended up being in the AP class group with the rest of my friends and most of like the more nerdy people so then my senior year rolls around and we've all been having a great year my class has all gotten pretty close with each other regardless of if they were in AP or if they were a part of the popular group it really didn't matter to us that much so then prom season rolls around and I am obviously not going to go with a boyfriend because I don't have one but I do end up going with my best male friend and he asked me in the most beautiful way possible he wrote me a poem and then gave me a rose it was just so sweet I loved it so then as we get closer to prom nominations for prom king and queen are coming up and some of my friends decided to just nominate my best friend and I because we were kind of like the It couple even though we weren't a couple because he's gay and I'm straight but we were inseparable so that's just like who we were everyone acknowledged that if you were getting one of us you were also going to get the other one so then it kind of caught on and we kind of made a joke out of it and we were like what if we just get nominated and we go for it so we got a bunch of the people in our classes to nominate us and we ended up getting on the ballot and then at this point we were like you know what what if we just do this what if we just win for The Underdogs for all of the weird nerdy kids who never thought that they could be prom king or queen and then we just decided that we would that we wanted to try and see if this would happen so we kind of campaigned if you can really call it that basically we just posted some like cute toy pictures on Instagram but we were so adamant about it we wanted to win so badly just so we could prove it to ourselves so then prom night rolls around we both look fabulous and we're so ready to see if this actually happens as everyone is coming in we like telling people to just vote for us vote for us like we were probably really annoying now that I think about it but honestly I don't care because the story ended up really nicely and then it's finally that time of night where they're going to Crown prom king and queen they call me and my friend up and the other two couples who were nominated and and then they give us our prom royalty sashes and we're standing there I'm holding his hand we're both like super sweaty because we really want to know if we won and then it happens they call out our names and we won prom king and queen and then what happens after this kind of ended up being a blur to me because I was just like in of all of this they gave us our crowns and then we went on to the dance floor and they started playing a song and I don't even remember what it was at this point because I was just like too out of it so we're standing on this dance floor dancing but basically all we'll do is like smiling at each other cuz we can't even believe that this actually happened and then as we were dancing we were just smiling at each other because we were just both so in awe of the moment and I will never forget the look on his face and you also have to understand that he's like 6 feet tall and I'm like 54 at that point I was wearing heels so like maybe a couple inches taller so he's like super tall and high above me and I'm like just this short little girl and we're basically just like swaying on this dance floor with a giant circle of people like staring at us and it was super uncomfortable for me like even though I've performed on stages in front of people in plays and like sung in front of people I just I couldn't take this attention it was too weird and then I ended up feeling so uncomfortable that I pulled in my other best friend to come and dance with us and then she pulled in her date and then everyone else started dancing with us and then it just became the most incredible night and the reason that this is the one memory that I never want to forget is because I accomplished something that was one of my childhood dreams like it was kind of a dumb dream it's not something that I really think about now it wasn't even something that I thought about throughout high school but child me really really wanted to be that like cool kid wanted to be the one who got to wear the Tiara and on my senior prom night I finally did it and it was just such an incredible experience to be able to like give that to my childhood self I know this is getting a little bit philosophical but it was so rewarding for that little girl that I have inside of me still to be able to see like grownup me accomplish what she had always wanted and it was just such a special special moment and also I felt like we had accomplished something for ourselves even in that moment like we were just these weird kids who didn't know what they were doing but we broke that popular and unpopular barrier that night and it was just so special to me I know how high school that sounds and it is very high school but to me that memory proves something to me it proved to me that I'm capable of accomplishing the things that I set my mind to now I know that might sound too deep and like I might be putting too much on just becoming Prom Queen in high school but it's honestly something that I can look back on now and remind myself of whenever I have doubts about what I can do and so to all of you who are currently in high school and you feel like you're out of place like a misfit like you just don't belong or that you will never accomplish what you want to accomplish I promise you if me and my rag tag group of Misfit friends could become prom king and queen in high school you can do anything I'll insert a picture right here if you guys want to see what we looked like after we got our crowns and we had our picture taken it was a very fun moment and if I do say so myself we looked pretty fabulous I also have my tiara here and my prom royalty sash I keep this on my bookshelf if you guys have seen it in my bookshelf tour that is what it's from and I'm going to wear it to finish off this video because I feel like it's fitting I feel super weird wearing this I'm having flashbacks to high school so that just about covers my whole story but just a reminder to anyone who is in high school right now and you feel like you're having hard time I promise you you can make it through it High School feels like it lasts forever but it doesn't there is so much more after you leave and there's so much more for you to explore and experience and it will be beautiful I feel like I never really talk about this side of me but it's really fun to tell you all personal stories so if you'd like to hear more of these definitely let me know once again a huge thank you to penguin teen for sponsoring this video and for sending me a copy of the one memory of Flora banks by Emily bar which once again comes out this may so so you should definitely go and check it out if you'd like to but that is it for this video if you would like to follow me on any of my social media all of my links are in the description box as always but thank you all so much for watching this video remember that you can accomplish your dreams and I will see you all in my next video byehey guys it's Hannah and today I'm coming to you with a video that's a bit different than the videos that I regularly do so today I'm going to be talking about the one memory that I would never want to forget and the idea for this video was inspired by the novel The One memory of Flora banks by Emily bar and this book is coming out this may this video is being sponsored by penguin teens so thank you so so much to them for sponsoring this video and for sending this book my way and also for coming up with this very cool idea the one memory of Flora Banks follows the story of this girl named Flora who at age 10 had a brain tumor removed and as a result of that surgery she was left with anterograde amnesia I think that's how you'd pronounce that essentially what that means is she doesn't have a short-term memory so she can remember things for maybe like an hour or two but after that she loses those memories she remembers like who her parents are and how to do like basic things because she has all of her memories from before she was 10 years old but ever since having that surgery she has trouble creating new memories the plot really takes off when Flora ends up kissing Drake her best friend Paige's boyfriend friend and for whatever reason this memory actually sticks the next day when she wakes up she still remembers kissing Drake and that's something that never really happens for her since she has trouble creating new memories that's all I can really say for the plot of this book without getting into too many spoilers but now I want to get into a bit of a review I was really intrigued by the premise of this book I thought it was a really fascinating idea and I'm the type of person who really likes to explore a character in depth so I thought that being able to explore a character like this and be inside of their mind would be really interesting and I wasn't disappointed in that aspect at all the book is written in a very choppy and repetitive way and that might be a turnoff for some people but personally I really enjoyed it because I thought that it was very fitting for the way that Flora herself was thinking she will do something or write something down or something will happen and she remembers it in the moment and of course like 10 15 minutes later she still remembers but then the next day comes around or even a couple hours later come around and she just doesn't remember what has happened so the narration ends up repeating things that we already know about but they're things that Flora doesn't remember so for that reason it can feel a little bit disjointed but I thought that it was such a unique aspect to this book and something I've never seen before Flora spends the majority of this book trying to find Drake because she remembers kissing him and then she thinks that she's in love with him so it is pretty install lovey in that sense I am not a fan of insta love at all and the fact that she kind of thought for the majority of this book that Drake had cured her in some sort of way wasn't something that I was the biggest fan of but without giving any spoilers away the plot has much more to it than that characters do tend to get pretty annoying Flora herself kind of has the mind of a 10-year-old sometimes because that's where most of her memories have stuck so you can get a bit frustrated with her as you're reading this but personally I like unlikable characters and I really enjoyed that aspect of it so that was actually kind of fun for me to read overall I ended up giving this a three out of five stars I thought it had like I said a very very cool premise and I thought that the writing style was really interesting and the fact that you got to be so in-depth in a character's head was really fun for me but we do spend a majority of this book dealing with the insta love which is something that is very hard for me to get past and I also thought that the way that her parents treated her and some of the other characters treated her in this book wasn't the best thing in the world and I just really wasn't into a lot of that so it wasn't my favorite thing in that sense but overall it was a very gripping book for me and I read it so so quickly because I really just wanted to know how it was going to end so since Flora's story surrounds memory and the one memory that she ends up holding on to I'm going to be talking about the one memory that I would never want to forget so this is kind of like a story time is video but I'm really excited to tell you guys about this memory because I think it's a really fun one so when I found out that I'd be doing this video I was racking my brain trying to figure out what one memory I would have to choose out of all of my memories and I thought about it for a long time and I was thinking of going with something about my family or like my friends obviously like I don't ever want to let go of any memories I have of my family and my friends but when I was thinking through this I realized there is one memory that stands out to me kind of above all of my other ones but it was the night that I won prom queen my senior year of high school so let me get a little bit into this story because there are a lot of components to it so throughout my entire childhood and my middle school and high school life I was not a popular kid I was very nerdy I was really shy awkward uncomfortable I had a close-knit group of friends but that was only because all of us were exactly the same awkward shy nerdy weird kid kids essentially if you need help placing it just think of the show Glee my friends were basically all of the kids in glee club minus anyone who was popular that's who we were we were the awkward nerdy theater kids who loved singing and walked down the hall singing musical theater we were not fun to be around and I totally understand why we weren't cool but ever since I was a little kid and from the influence of watching a million Disney Channel original movies I always had this dream of becoming prom queen but it was never something I really admitted to myself or to anybody else because it was kind of like a pipe dream it was never going to happen but I always just fantasized about it because like I feel like it would just be fun to wear a tiara on your head you know just once and that was back in like my elementary school and middle school days where I had like never plucked my eyebrows and I thought I was cool for like rolling down my Uggs it was just not a pretty time you don't want pictures and I've burned them all anyway so but then as I got into high school I'd kind of accepted my status as one of the weird theater kids and the whole dream of becoming like popular or cool was kind of out the window because it was never going to happen at this point the other thing you have to understand about my high school is that I went to a high school with like 500 or 600 kids everyone knew everyone we all went to elementary school together to middle school together and high school together like we had grown up with each other and we all knew each other and it was a very uncomfortable situation watching everyone go through puberty so because of this in high school there were like clicks and there were the popular kids and the other kids but there was never really any animosity between the two groups mostly the way that my school ended up becoming divided was the people who took AP classes and then the people who didn't take AP classes and I ended up being in the AP class group with the rest of my friends and most of like the more nerdy people so then my senior year rolls around and we've all been having a great year my class has all gotten pretty close with each other regardless of if they were in AP or if they were a part of the popular group it really didn't matter to us that much so then prom season rolls around and I am obviously not going to go with a boyfriend because I don't have one but I do end up going with my best male friend and he asked me in the most beautiful way possible he wrote me a poem and then gave me a rose it was just so sweet I loved it so then as we get closer to prom nominations for prom king and queen are coming up and some of my friends decided to just nominate my best friend and I because we were kind of like the It couple even though we weren't a couple because he's gay and I'm straight but we were inseparable so that's just like who we were everyone acknowledged that if you were getting one of us you were also going to get the other one so then it kind of caught on and we kind of made a joke out of it and we were like what if we just get nominated and we go for it so we got a bunch of the people in our classes to nominate us and we ended up getting on the ballot and then at this point we were like you know what what if we just do this what if we just win for The Underdogs for all of the weird nerdy kids who never thought that they could be prom king or queen and then we just decided that we would that we wanted to try and see if this would happen so we kind of campaigned if you can really call it that basically we just posted some like cute toy pictures on Instagram but we were so adamant about it we wanted to win so badly just so we could prove it to ourselves so then prom night rolls around we both look fabulous and we're so ready to see if this actually happens as everyone is coming in we like telling people to just vote for us vote for us like we were probably really annoying now that I think about it but honestly I don't care because the story ended up really nicely and then it's finally that time of night where they're going to Crown prom king and queen they call me and my friend up and the other two couples who were nominated and and then they give us our prom royalty sashes and we're standing there I'm holding his hand we're both like super sweaty because we really want to know if we won and then it happens they call out our names and we won prom king and queen and then what happens after this kind of ended up being a blur to me because I was just like in of all of this they gave us our crowns and then we went on to the dance floor and they started playing a song and I don't even remember what it was at this point because I was just like too out of it so we're standing on this dance floor dancing but basically all we'll do is like smiling at each other cuz we can't even believe that this actually happened and then as we were dancing we were just smiling at each other because we were just both so in awe of the moment and I will never forget the look on his face and you also have to understand that he's like 6 feet tall and I'm like 54 at that point I was wearing heels so like maybe a couple inches taller so he's like super tall and high above me and I'm like just this short little girl and we're basically just like swaying on this dance floor with a giant circle of people like staring at us and it was super uncomfortable for me like even though I've performed on stages in front of people in plays and like sung in front of people I just I couldn't take this attention it was too weird and then I ended up feeling so uncomfortable that I pulled in my other best friend to come and dance with us and then she pulled in her date and then everyone else started dancing with us and then it just became the most incredible night and the reason that this is the one memory that I never want to forget is because I accomplished something that was one of my childhood dreams like it was kind of a dumb dream it's not something that I really think about now it wasn't even something that I thought about throughout high school but child me really really wanted to be that like cool kid wanted to be the one who got to wear the Tiara and on my senior prom night I finally did it and it was just such an incredible experience to be able to like give that to my childhood self I know this is getting a little bit philosophical but it was so rewarding for that little girl that I have inside of me still to be able to see like grownup me accomplish what she had always wanted and it was just such a special special moment and also I felt like we had accomplished something for ourselves even in that moment like we were just these weird kids who didn't know what they were doing but we broke that popular and unpopular barrier that night and it was just so special to me I know how high school that sounds and it is very high school but to me that memory proves something to me it proved to me that I'm capable of accomplishing the things that I set my mind to now I know that might sound too deep and like I might be putting too much on just becoming Prom Queen in high school but it's honestly something that I can look back on now and remind myself of whenever I have doubts about what I can do and so to all of you who are currently in high school and you feel like you're out of place like a misfit like you just don't belong or that you will never accomplish what you want to accomplish I promise you if me and my rag tag group of Misfit friends could become prom king and queen in high school you can do anything I'll insert a picture right here if you guys want to see what we looked like after we got our crowns and we had our picture taken it was a very fun moment and if I do say so myself we looked pretty fabulous I also have my tiara here and my prom royalty sash I keep this on my bookshelf if you guys have seen it in my bookshelf tour that is what it's from and I'm going to wear it to finish off this video because I feel like it's fitting I feel super weird wearing this I'm having flashbacks to high school so that just about covers my whole story but just a reminder to anyone who is in high school right now and you feel like you're having hard time I promise you you can make it through it High School feels like it lasts forever but it doesn't there is so much more after you leave and there's so much more for you to explore and experience and it will be beautiful I feel like I never really talk about this side of me but it's really fun to tell you all personal stories so if you'd like to hear more of these definitely let me know once again a huge thank you to penguin teen for sponsoring this video and for sending me a copy of the one memory of Flora banks by Emily bar which once again comes out this may so so you should definitely go and check it out if you'd like to but that is it for this video if you would like to follow me on any of my social media all of my links are in the description box as always but thank you all so much for watching this video remember that you can accomplish your dreams and I will see you all in my next video bye\n"