This is how many of my weekdays play out, until I found my way past many struggles.
In June 2024, my sister graduated from Palo Alto high school while I graduated from middle school. While her graduation was a monumental moment for our family, it marked a new chapter for my life as well — I too would now spend the next few years of my life striving to be accepted into a prestigious university.
I entered ninth grade taking both Geometry Honors and Biology Honors, already trying to do everything “right.”
At the same time, I was accepted onto the Paly Robotics team as I tried to immerse myself in STEM. I understood from the start that this would eat up a lot of my time, but time commitment meant nothing if I was learning new skills and enjoying what I did.
Continuing a trend of trying new things, I had begun boxing at a local gym. It gave me a sense of discipline and clarity, serving as a space to focus on myself after a long day of spending my thoughts on work.
After months of deepening my interest in the sport, I made the decision that I wanted to box competitively.
But during the second semester, robotics competition season commenced, and I had to choose between pouring my time into robotics or boxing. It was a tough decision, but I made it with the mindset that robotics was a STEM activity, typically seen as a prestigious route for college, while boxing wasn’t. I opted for what gave me a greater sense of achievement, not for myself, but for colleges.
In retrospect, this decision resembled my plan for high school: do what you’re supposed to do, not what you necessarily want to do.
While my freshman year had introduced me to academic stress, it was a mere start to what I experienced in my sophomore year.
During the first semester, I joined three school publications as well as the Model UN team. I struggled a lot, negligently letting my mental health to diminish as a result of overwhelming amounts of work building on top of each other.
I understood that six or less h ours of sleep was only amplifying my stress, but without this, could I really consider myself a success?
But in the midst of my experiences with sleepless nights, I was only adding to an epidemic of students enduring the same challenges.
A multitude of studies have found that sleep is the key to regulating behavior and emotions, though “nearly 70% don’t get enough, causing physical, mental and behavioral problems,” according to the Child Mind Institute.
There were many moments in which I reached the point of burnout. There were many moments in which I had felt the weight I had loaded onto myself only to push through, not realizing the impacts. I have cried, I have felt emotional pain, I have felt lost so many times. Over time, the stress which was harming me had stopped being temporary. It became consistent.
I still remember one specific night last semester. After taking a difficult Chemistry test which had mentally drained me, I had went to robotics for hours until finally returning home at 10 p.m. But the already long day was not over. I had a math test the next day that I needed to prepare for with a heavy, cluttered mind.
But after preparing my desk with materials and my computer to begin a long study session, I shed a tear, then two, then multiple run down my face. The emotions I tried to bottle up had broken free, turning the night into a reflection on my life.
The turning point did not come so easily. I had to endure months of these pressures to finally make changes.
Towards the end of the semester, I had understood that I was doing everything wrong. Stacking extracurricular activities on top of classes which were challenging enough was not doing anything to help me stand out to colleges. I was only ruining myself.
My attempts to optimize myself to become a greater applicant meant nothing if I was sacrificing my ability to love my life for this goal.
But unknowingly, I too changed as my life did.
I realized only after that I was more impatient and easily angered by anything my friends said or did. At home, I ignored my parents and went straight to my room to work after spending hours at robotics or other places after school.
I was becoming a horrible person to the people around me, and it was all due to my own decisions.
Despite everything I had believed, what truly changed me was how my parents reacted to everything. Though my sister attends a prestigious university, neither she nor my parents want that of me if it comes at such a cost.
They understand life’s struggles, its ups and downs, and the only thing they want from me is to love high school, to love my classes and to love the activities I pour my time into.
As my mother says to me often, what she only wants from me is to return home from school everyday and be the same, energetic, happy-go-lucky, kid I was mere years ago.
And it’s for these realizations for which I spend my fourth semester of high school happier and more excited to wake up everyday and achieve what I am meant to.
With my goal now being to truly live and exist as a human in the now rather than to forcefully set myself up for the future, I have been able to treat my work as something that builds me instead of defines me.
Spending less time at my desk and more at the gym has allowed me to continue strengthening myself since boxing isn’t available to me anymore.
What I, and many other students, struggled to understand is that you can’t see yourself at certain stages of your life until those stages arrive.
But we all need to remember that high school is not meant to be a checklist of accomplishments. The future will come whether we map out every step or not.
While the future may be a large collection of steps, right now, today, the only goal is to move on to the next.