Life is a Pain and I’m only in High School…

Many adults who have graduated from college will agree when I say that school is the easy part, it’s all about what happens after that. I mean I don’t disagree, but I don’t exactly agree with the statement either.

With my small amount of experience I have gathered that school sucks. A lot of people hate it, few love it. Very, very few. But since my range of experience is a bit limited, I will stick to the knowledge that I’ve gathered.

Here’s a little back story:

I don’t wanna toot my own horn, but I’m not ashamed of sharing it. I was a pretty rockin’ kid. I got awards medals, other impressive stuff. Through my baby eyes I was a genius. And then I grew up. The older you get, the more reality starts to hit and I learned that early. Through elementary I was a model student, I did all my work, I paid attention in class, I participated, I was active outside of school. I was a dream. But then you age and you realize that so did a lot of other kids, and they probably did more too.

At one point I was so obsessed with getting straight A’s that I would forgo hours and hours of sleep, skip breakfast and stop talking to my friends and family. Pay mind that at my current age I am still growing, so losing sleep, breakfast, and social interactions was a terrible influence on me.

I’m over it now though so that’s a good thing. But more than that I feel as though I have reflected enough upon why it has happened and I can comfortably talk about it.

The “Why” Part:

Growing up in the environment I did was extremely motivating. My parent’s and family’s expectations were not to wild and they were all achievable. However when you enter Middle School that attitude stays with you but it also multiplies in a sense. You gotta keep doing what you’re doing, but now you gotta start doing even more. And then in High School, it just gets even worse. It’s like you’ve been expected to do well your entire life and the moment you fail is the moment everything changes. For example, feeling like you can never succeed in life if you get a B.

Here’s a quick chart I made on what I’ve just explained, to make the idea easier to grasp. In the simplest of sentences, life gets harder as you get older.

Now to add to this visual representation, also note that the following things also grow in proportion to the growth of expectancy…

• Stress Levels
• Amount of tears shed
• Hate for everyone and everything
• Bitterness towards outlook on life
• Pain in my heart

Now here are things that decay as time goes by and expectancy rises…

• Happiness
• Joy
• My childhood
• The amount of tolerance I have about anything
• Outlook on life
• Outlook on anything really.

This is just from one student’s perspective, imagine every student in the world wrote a post about their experience in school. Not many would be positive.

What Happens Next

What happens next is that I have a panic attack, I get B’s, I get over it, and my life has improved tenfold. Not too difficult to understand. My grades and work ethics have not dropped too far but they have definitely dropped. Am I sad? No. Recently, stress levels in teens have been way higher than should be healthy.

Teens are so stressed that we resemble adults with our stress levels, teens just younger than them:

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2013/teen-stress.aspx

Personal experience tells me that relaxing every once in a while will not ruin my life and will take stress off the knots in my shoulders and wrists. Everyone should try it, honestly, it’s a pretty great deal. But then again, teachers and their assignments really ruin it for everyone, huh.

In my opinion, I think it’s because some teachers have this warped idea that their class takes priority over everything else and then they decided to assign hours of homework every night.

Please understand that we have other things to do too.

Listen parents, teachers, colleges… I may not be enrolled in 7 AP classes, may not speak 9 languages, or may not have found the cure to cancer or world hunger, but I still have qualities that are beneficial to the world.

To teachers exclusively, I want to be able to look back at my high school years and remember something other then being stuck at home doing work. And I don’t want you to be all bitter about your career because you spend a lot of time grading papers. Help us help you.

To my fellow students, we all have qualities that we can bring to the table, you just gotta be the best you can be and hope things work out at this point. Don’t be too obsessed about your grades and what not, make sure you can create some memories worth sharing.

-Vivian