The forest where most of the crying happens

I won’t be alone in saying that the first semester of my senior year was a tumultuous one. I was challenged by coursework, college applications, extracurriculars, and the act of judiciously balancing all three together. 

More than anything, I was challenged by the act of feeling.

I spent a lot of my underclassmen years trying to stifle any emotions or personal challenges I was facing by preoccupying myself with loads of work (or Netflix). I wanted to keep myself busy at all times so that I wouldn’t have to confront anything I was going to at the time; I marched through life with a straight face because I was convinced that it would all be “worth it”; i.e, I would get into a “good” college and it would not matter that I had suppressed all the stuff I felt because doing so had landed me this result. 

The most difficult part about this year has been confronting and correcting that ideology. Over the course of these few months, like some sort of emotionally exhausting Chinese water torture, I’ve realized that that’s not true. That there’s a very real chance that no matter how many feelings I stifled in favor of aggressive productivity that I won’t arrive at an outcome my 15 year old self would have envied. And I’ve had to make peace with that, slowly, and sometimes painfully. I’ve had to redefine the way I view failure, not as an inability to achieve a result, but as an ability to recognize and prioritize the value of what you sacrificed to try and achieve that result. It’s cliche, but you’ll really only grow up once. You’ll only feel all the terrible and awesome emotions of growing up once. 

This realization was catalyzed, in part, by practicality. As I learned more about the volatility of the college admissions process, the more of a logical fallacy the catch-all “hard work equals success” seemed to become. The more prominent reason, I think, was that of exhaustion. It takes such a big toll on your mind and body to maintain such a high level of apathy. It builds up, like if you shake a bottle of coke, and then it all overflows, in one big great wave. Maybe it was because I was caught up in the adrenaline of it all, or enchanted by my freshman self’s naive musings, but I don’t think I realized how tired I was until this year. 

I’m still tired. But now I take walks while crying in snowy forests and scream into pillows. I ride the rollercoaster that is the five stages of grief instead of walking past it. And that’s helped.

I’m entering second semester with the same mindset. It should be easier, I think, without the stress of college applications. I’m still learning how to stop using a preoccupation with productivity as a band aid for much deeper wounds. I want to get absurdly good at the guitar; I want to make more Target runs. I want to watch movies at midnight; I want to actually make use of the state’s allotted mental health days. I want to spend what time I have left in high school with my friends instead of distracting myself with schoolwork and whatnot as a way to compensate for everything I didn’t do right.

I hope any incoming seniors reading this (if any) take time to rest now, next semester, and your senior year. Let yourself feel and breathe. It’s ridiculously unhealthy to make being a “workaholic” a point of pride, no matter how much parents or others encourage it. I think the worst thing you can do as a senior is punish yourself for taking time off, whether it’s a mental health day to process a college decision letter or hitting the mall on a random Wednesday. Maintaining a facade of apathy is exhausting, but so is unwavering optimism (it can get repetitive hearing “you’ll be okay wherever you end up!!”). First semester senior year is a really difficult time, so acknowledge it as such. If you’re like me, it’ll feel weird, at first. But the more you do it, the easier it’ll become.