School was never considered a task to me, it was an opportunity. Every day at school was a good day because I consistently felt myself growing and getting better. I feel a mass amount of nostalgia looking back to my elementary school years. Everything was simple and laid out for me by warm teachers and outgoing kids. The goal of success that I had in sight at that time seemed not so far-fetched, it was right in front of me. Naturally, growing up is a part of life and as we grow up so do our responsibilities and our education. As every year of school passed I felt success was getting further and further out of reach. Challenge after challenge I had to overcome, and an overwhelming feeling of doubt and defeat was something I could not escape.

School was truly a stroll in the park up until 7th grade. I made the decision to do online school starting in that year in order to focus on my acting career. It is safe to say that I was naïve about how difficult it would be to learn outside of a school environment and on a solely self-disciplined effort. I was home schooled from that point on to 10th grade. I did have teachers, but they were only there if I had questions. I had to go through the lessons and essentially teach myself. It was an extremely difficult process because I really had no idea if any of the work I was doing was right. Several times a day I would reach out to my teachers and only walked away from it embarrassed. My teachers would get very irritated with my questions and would every now and then question my intelligence. This was a huge hit to the heart for me because I have not only always been an A-B student, but I was always one of the teacher’s favorites. This discouragement inevitably leads me to self-doubt about my capabilities. 

Once I was able to get past my first year of home schooling I worked harder than ever on my education. I was finishing all of my work months ahead of my schedule carrying a 4.0 and with no help of my teachers. It became clear to me that no one was going to hold my hand anymore. If I wanted to get somewhere and better myself I had to do it on my own because I so badly desired to do so. In retrospect, if my teachers hadn’t neglected me and made me feel incompetent I would have never felt the need to set the bar higher for myself to succeed by my own merit. My experience of home schooling was a sink or swim moment where I could have given up and slacked on my work or I could take advantage of the chance I had to work ahead and excel. This fire I had in me to keep swimming was driven by all of the goals I had in life. There were too many things that I wanted to accomplish like getting my bachelor’s degree or making a successful living that sets me up to let my dad retire one day. I wasn’t just doing it for myself, I was doing it for my family that I wanted to pay back some day for all they had done for me. Teaching myself to navigate through online school was worth every second and every minute of frustration and struggle because I knew the payoff would be epic. 

For a while I was on a great streak of dominating my school work and really exceeding my own expectations. I was in line to graduate a year early which was just something I never thought I was capable of. However, I hit a wall where I felt like I was missing something. For one, I realized there was more to high school then just the academics. I was missing out on the experience of high school the football games, the dances and the pep rallies. Furthermore, I felt that I was not setting myself up properly for college. College was on the horizon and it was time for me to start thinking of my future past high school. Though I was doing quite well at home schooling I did not feel like I was getting enough out of it to compete with other students going into college applications. I ended up transitioning back to traditional school with my main priority being college preparation. It was an immediate culture shock going into traditional school because I was one of thousands of kids. We all were fighting for attention from our teachers for extra credit or redo’s or extra time to work on something we did not understand. That experience was every man for themselves because at the end of the day this time in high school and the ending results were all going to determine where we are in the next 2 years. My English teacher, I vividly remember, would call us “Grade Grubbers” because we would hound her every chance we got for extra credit or extra time to work on assignments. While she may be right, we were a nuisance, we all knew what was at stake and were willing to do anything and everything to have the upper hand over each other. 

 I eventually got my grounding at school and found my strategies to be a successful student but there wasn’t a day that went by that I felt not only overwhelmed but I felt helpless. When I really wanted to understand something, it was very difficult for me to get assistance from a teacher due to the mass number of students that they had to help. I felt invisible and was just hoping for the best when it was time for assessments. There genuinely never seemed to be enough time. I would have given an arm and a leg to get an extra day in the week or a couple more hours in a day. I had a lot of trust in my own skills due to being homeschooled, but I still felt in the dark and fell back into a state of isolation. I went from feeling isolation being a homeschool student missing out on social aspects to feeling isolation amongst my peers in school that saw me solely as competition. It was the isolation that created the competition, and the competition that created the isolation. I didn’t know it was even possible to feel so alone in a school with over 5000 kids. These were the years that matter and could determine our entire future. We would all be comparing our AP’s, SAT and ACT scores, our extra curriculars. I felt as if I was competing with every single person in my grade to be the best student. As if that was not hard enough, we had frequent guidance meetings in my junior and senior year where we input all of our current stats and see where we all ranked amongst each other. In these rankings it would show where we stand with the universities we aspired to go to and if we were even eligible to be accepted. I felt as if I blinked for even a second I would fall behind everyone. I had never before seen school as a race to the finish line or statistically based but that all changed in these final years. 

This relentless rivalry threw me into a spiral where I was starting to slowly slip away from my life and was rarely seeing my friends and neglecting my family. I would hibernate in my room or a coffee shop while working on all of my homework and trying to do any ounce of extra credit. I would do anything to keep my A’s and to validate myself as a perfect student. Though I believe my intentions were in the right place, I got stuck in the struggles of being a student with a desire to be great. In the midst of overanalyzing my peers and their strategies and mindsets, I realized that everyone has their own agenda with several goals and everyone for the most part wants to go to college. I am a dime a dozen and if I had any shot of going to my dream school I had to set myself apart from every other student aside from having great stats. My mental health was without a doubt struggling due to school which heavily impacted my life outside of my education and I am sure this was a common feeling other students were feeling as well, it was only a matter of who could hide it best. This was the hardest hurdle I had to overcome in all my years of school because I was letting it overtake my entire being and was ultimately losing myself in this competition that shouldn’t have been a competition to begin with.  

Looking back on my youthful years of school, I have always been a competitive student. I was determined to get the gold star and the book charms. All that has really changed since then is that the stakes have gotten higher. It came time to apply to colleges and I have always known it to be a stressful process, but I had no idea of the toll it would take on me. I procrastinated as long as I could because the longer I held out the longer I avoided rejection. It didn’t matter how many college applications I completed I never felt satisfied or had the reassuring feeling of confidence. I instilled a mentality of expecting the worst but hoping for the best. I tried to believe whole heartedly that I had done the best I could and that everything happens for a reason because that was going to be my cushion to catch my rejection. My number one school was New York University and that was a pipe dream in the September I applied. The acceptance rate was not promising, and I could not help but feel just proficient. If I mentioned to anyone my aspirations the first questions that followed was “what are your test scores?” “what is your GPA?” Deep down I knew that NYU saw more in students than just their numbers so that is where my confidence resided in, my passion for greatness and to make a difference in this world. I had to remind myself in these conversations that I am more than my numbers. 

I was stuck on a mental rollercoaster that I could not get off of. One day I would be on a high where I was beyond proud of myself and had full confidence in all my work that I had done to prepare. Sooner or later, I would get stuck thinking of what everyone else had been doing. Everyone did loads of charity work and were captains of their sports teams, just like me. Everyone took several AP’s and have over a 4.0. This thought ran circles through my mind relentlessly which was just draining me day by day. It was a domino effect, I did not feel good enough to get into these colleges which lead me to believe I was not good enough in school in general, I was not good enough for anything. I was completely deflated while awaiting an acceptance. That is the word that tore me down every day, acceptance. I needed to be accepted by these schools or all of my hard work as a student and as a person was for nothing. I would have failed. All the time I had sacrificed with my family and my friends and to only come up short. That was a petrifying thought to be rejected and not know where to go from there. In the end, I realized that all the work I had been doing since kindergarten was all to receive validation. I needed the validation from these universities that I wanted to be a part of in order to feel like I was good enough and that the past 12 years have not been a complete waste. That is what all of us wanted, validation that we could not give ourselves. 

Simultaneously, being absent from life in general I believe I was unconsciously absent from the learning process as well. The point of school and going in everyday to this fulfilling place is to be a sponge. To enter every day with excitement and curiosity to soak up any new information we could. This glowing opportunity of getting a higher education at a university ahead of all of us, it preoccupied our minds to where it inevitably blurred the point of learning. We were looking past the gift of learning and almost took those years for granted due to being so preoccupied by the next step.

I am now a student at my dream school which looking back now, the struggle was all worth it. If I had to do it all over again, I would. My process to success at this point is that the key to validation is isolation. I really do not know if that is correct or not because it did get me where I needed to be, but it also tore apart some valuable time of my youth that I can never get back. I don’t think kids or teenagers should have to be so invested in their education to the point where they are losing their sense of self and forgetting every other part of their life. I along with many other students need to recognize that my self-worth is not determined by my education. My home school teachers and occupied high school teachers do not define if I am good enough or not. My thousands of peers are not better than or less than, they simply do not determine my future. I strongly believe that it was my desire and yearning for success that is what makes me a great student who deserves to be where I am today. I needed the struggle.