The room was blurry. My mind was spinning. The projector board was a series of indecipherable tasks to accomplish. My eighth grade self sat awkwardly at my desk, palms sweating, legs shaking.The counselors were going through the list of classes and credits that go toward graduation. I felt like I needed to do everything to be successful.
The students around me seemed to be calm about the new information that was thrown at us. It felt like I was the only one that was freaking out. This of course wasn’t true, but my mind was too stressed to realize it. Their words came tumbling down, and it felt like there was no clear path.
The fear took over bit by bit as summer went by. Before I knew it, I was on my way into the freshman campus. The school felt like a big weight room, and I was trying to bench perfect grades and honor classes. I could win a competition with the amount I was lifting.
I felt like I could never make a mistake. The different opinions from videos online and parents looming over my head constantly followed me around my freshman year. The first semester was like being in a big ocean of people. I was trying to stay afloat, but had no raft and eventually started sinking.
By the second semester it got to the point where I didn’t care anymore. There were late night breakdowns and homework debacles. I was never mentally present in my classes anymore.
Resting didn’t feel like resting. It was worrying for my grades and how I should be doing a certain amount of AP classes. The weight I’d been holding eventually fell on me. I compared myself to every person around me and thought they were doing better.
My school-oriented personality never came back after covid and it killed my attention span. No matter how much I tried, I had lost a part of myself that I needed so desperately in high school. Nearing the end of ninth grade, I still hadn’t found that girl again.
As the year came to an end, my classes slowly got away from me, and my freshman year flickered out. I had talked to a counselor shortly before the year ended and her words still stick with me.
“You are doing just fine,” she said. “You are a wonderful person and will go places.” Though her words were simple, they were all I needed to get back up again.
They helped me realize something. I don’t need to do what others are doing to succeed. I don’t need to be the best in all these classes to get somewhere. My future exists as long as I am happy with what I will do. That is when I decided in my sophomore year, no more comparison, no more trying to do everything, and to stick to what I knew I could do.
And guess what? When I focused on my strengths, I got better grades and was happier. I am doing better than I ever thought I could do. All it took was a little change of perspective.
With a year of high school under my belt, I can see the difference. All I needed was a little change and blocking out the voices. I wish I could go back to my scared eighth grader self and tell her that I was going to be fine. I could do what was right for me.
As high schoolers we are swarmed by all of the different pathways to take. Everyone’s opinion is different. I could be doing everything yet be doing nothing in someone else’s eyes. We forget that we matter more than their voices.
I still have growing to do, but I feel confident in the steps I can take to get to the best version of myself.
