My Experience In High School

It was freshman year in high school, and I was ecstatic about the fact that I can officially refer to myself as a high school student. However, not everything was perfect, nor filled with sunshine and rainbows. It was just two weeks into the school year when I faced my first arduous obstacle.

I would like to pretend that the bridge between elementary school and high school did not exist for me—that junior high just did not happen. I was a seemingly thoughtless kid, determined to make it out of school entirely and live in my own world where nobody could tell me what to do. I was awkward, irrational, and rebellious, three qualities I cannot thank my parents enough for dealing with. But the experiences and people I encountered in my junior high years almost made that whole chapter of my life worth reliving. I went through a lot in junior high, and have many memories of ridiculous instances that make it easy to make fun of myself.

I walked into Urban wearing Abercrombie and Fitch Jeans, a maroon v-neck t-shirt with a cardigan, and tan Sperrys. I had planned the outfit out the night before, wanting to impress my peers and show off my mature and put together high school self. I came into the big cold Urban gym in with my head held high, believing, no, knowing that I had made the perfect outfit to represent myself on the first day of school. However, my confidence quickly deflated and red rushed to my cheeks as I realized my mistake.

I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when my family would ask me “So are you ready for high school?”. They would ask It with such enthusiasm my immediate response always happened to be a yes. I just thought of course I’m ready it’s just another step closer to growing up It couldn’t be that big of a change. When I look back at that now I can’t help but to see how naive I was for thinking It would be such a piece of cake, that I would come out being the same person I was before I started. I know now that without my high school experience I wouldn’t be the person I am today, and so for that very reason I am thankful.

At first there is nothing, it is dark. The only visible lights are the blue glows emitted from the work bulbs, and a small yellow line of light seeping in from under the grand curtain. I am in a frozen scene, a life, a story that is not my own. It is as if all the people around me turned to stone, and there I stood among them trying not to shake. The grand drape begins to squeak as it slowly glides open. For a moment the faces in the crowd looking up at me are visible, and the spotlights come on. Breaking the silence, the frozen statues and I begin to blink and come to life. This is how every performance began in the theatre productions I participated in at my high school. Theatre gave me an outlet to escape reality while creating a beautiful piece of art amongst newly blossoming friendships.

Whaaaannnnn! I hear as I wake up wiping my eyes. My one year old son Ashton is screaming his eyes out. I then waddled into the bedroom where he was laying and quickly put him back to sleep. I finally started to fall back asleep myself before I heard knocking on the bedroom door. It was my mother saying “Wake up it’s time for school”. I then laid in the bed and closed my eyes as I tried to get a few more minutes of rest when my mother then yelled from the other room “Get up, you are going to make me late for work”. I then knew from there it was going to be a long school year.

There have been times in my life in which my decisions have led to negative consequences. One of these biggest mistakes occurred my sophomore year.

The struggles of and the struggles people created for me during my high school years. Honor student, very quiet, ad never been apart of the crowd. The desire to fit in only resulted in a terrible experience and the devastation of the grades on my transcript. I became more into my social life then my education. It took self analyzing and the realization of the dreams that I want to achieve for a spark of change to come.

When I first attended Park fall of last year I was vastly unprepared for college, so when I entered as a nursing major I quickly realized two things. 1) I had no clue how to study 2) I’m not very good at anatomy.

It was the beginning of a new cycle. Every year was similar to the last. I would wake up Monday through Friday at 7:30am despising my past self for staying up so late playing video games or watching videos. Then I would take a shower, eat breakfast, and be driven to school. Once summer break would begin and I would stay up all night and sleep during the day. Then near the beginning of the school year my anxiety would strike, from me thinking of meeting new teachers and knowing if I would have any friends in my classes. This day changed all of that in the blink of an eye. It was May 14th, 2017, the day of graduation.

I am embarrassed and ashamed of the snapshot you have viewed of my performance in high school. Aside from my parents, no one apart of my life over the past decade is aware I am capable of such a poor performance. I feel ashamed because my actions represent more than just myself, I represent the Army as a senior leader, one who is charged with mentoring, training, and educating some of Americas brightest young men and women. My high school years do not define me; please take in consideration the tremendous work I have strived to accomplish over the past 15 years.

The day I left home for the first time to start Junior High was a bright day, brimming with hope and optimism. I’d always done well at school, so expectations for me were high, and I had gleefully set foot into a new chapter of student life, relationships and experiences. Now appearances, of course, can be deceptive, and to an extent, this spirited and energetic persona of mine had only been a veneer, although a very convincing one. The truth is underneath of it all, I was deeply unhappy, insecure and fundamentally frightened-- frightened of other people, of the future, of failure, and of the emptiness that I felt was within me. Despite all of this, I was very skilled at hiding it, and from the outside I appeared to be someone with everything to hope for and aspire to. This fantasy of invulnerability was so complete that I had even deceived myself, and by the end of the first year, no one could’ve predicted what was about to happen.

I watch from the beige colored sidewalk as my Ma pulls away in the Nissan Pathfinder that we dubbed as the ‘Blue Shoe.’ I turn and look up at the newly built building. There it stands in its newly built glory, the sun is rising behind the building and it seems to cast a halo effect on it. Little did I know it would be like Hell more than Heaven. It was my first year of going to a public school, I was a 6th grader this year, as I had been doing my schooling at home. With this came the ability to be a grade ahead because Ma said that I was to busy when I was younger.

In the late months of the two-thousand and fourteen first semester, I had begun my dangerous excursion into a precarious realm of stress and irritation to a juvenile network of literacy and instruction. I was beginning my first year of high school, which was still a new territory for me. I had previously attended at Howe middle school, but I was not prepared for high school. At my high school, the building is different than any other building on the campus. The high school building is on one continuous slab of the concrete foundation, but there is a gap in between the two halves of the building. In this gap, there is a connecting concrete flooring that is level with the two previous halves’ floors. The Howe students, faculty and I called this structure the “breezeway.” During a hot school day, the wind tunneled through the breezeway and brush across me like an ocean of cool air. Of all the memories in the breezeway at my high school, I can remember one moment where I saw something that changed my outlook on what I wanted to become.

In the middle my 8th grade school year, I had to move and transfer schools. I was not at all pleased with this move because the new area that we lived in was completely different from what I was used to in my old neighborhood. Being at this new school, I spoke to a few people but I mostly just kept to myself. Until I met a girl named Morgan. We had to work together for a group math project. Once the project was over we still remain friends because our personalities were so similiar. She got me out of my comfort zone, showed me the ropes around the school, and even introduced me to a lot people that I eventually became friends with own my terms. Our conversations at school soon expanded to talking 24/7 at home. Later we realized that we lived about 5 minutes from each other and that made our friendship grow even more closer. By the time the school year came to an end we had become full blown bestfriends.