Lying to Myself

“I need to get straight A’s.” “If I don’t get straight A’s, I will have trouble getting into college.”

Once I entered high school, a new expectation was set upon me as a student. My thoughts had modified to surrounding two words, ‘grades’ and ‘college.’ These two elements have been stuck circling my mind throughout all of high school so far. However, I am not too surprised by it.

When I was little, I dreamed of my future. I longed for it like a person would with wealth, reaching for it with hope of achieving it one day. The promises and freedom that were being showcased as earnings once you grew up were running through my mind like blood runs through a body. I yearned for it. However, it didn’t take too long after for myself to realize the unanswered question that stood as the elephant in the room. How was I going to achieve this?

I have always been a hardworking and dedicated student I would say. Even if I didn’t do exemplar work on everything, I always tried my best even if I didn’t fully understand something. No matter what, this is what I have striven to do since kindergarten and it worked for me for as long as I can remember. However, once high school crept into my mind, my thoughts and feelings changed and have since never met with their original foundation.

When I was a freshmen in high school, I set new expectations for myself since the environment held new ones as well. These new expectations embodied everything that I now would detest. Receiving perfect grades, working all day on schoolwork, and intensifying work if my first expectation wasn’t met were a few of the ‘rules’ I set upon myself. In the moment, it seemed like this was what I needed, but I soon realized it was merely a nightmare in disguise.

I started to drown myself with the impossible. I went to school and would go home working on whatever I needed to do and then whatever I FELT like I needed to do. This included studying for hours on a test that would have been avoided if I had just let a glimpse of confidence seep into my mind. This lifestyle that I had set up for myself was detrimental and it was apparent to everyone but myself.

Entering my sophomore year, I started and ended with the same lifestyle that I had made a year earlier. However this year, it was different. It seemed as though the workload wasn’t causing me to spend my whole day locked up in my room at my desk. It was as if I wasn’t working hard enough. The months of March, April, May, and June brought the pandemic that we all know into play. This caused my workload to almost disappear as school wasn’t the number one priority on anyone’s mind. I wondered why for so long that my same lifestyle wasn’t inducing the long hours of school work that I had previously anticipated. It all became apparent entering my junior year of high school.

Once I became a junior, it was very clear to me what was expected of me. I now needed to worry about SAT’s and college along with my grades in general. I soon realized that the lifestyle I had made two years prior wasn’t going to fit perfectly with the new elements that have been added to my agenda. Due to this important realization, I let my lifestyle fall into oblivion.

After experiencing a few months as a junior, I was finally able to understand my confusion that had been brought up in my sophomore year. It wasn’t that I was lacking in my work. It was solely based on the fact that there were hardships introduced, leaving my workload at a bare minimum. I think it was also slightly due to the fact that sophomore year, as everyone says, is everyone’s easiest year of high school workload wise.

As an almost senior in high school, I have come to the conclusion that working hours on end to achieve unnecessary tasks is not the answer to success. There is no point drowning myself in tasks when I could be focusing on the key things that life has to offer me. School is not all about grades. It’s about learning time management and communication with others. There are so many other life altering lessons that don’t become visible to the naive mind of freshmen right away. I hope that all students realize that there is so much more out there and high school isn’t even a quarter of it.