My Experience In High School

I recall the beginning of my freshman year when I was thrown into the chaotic and hectic mess that is high school. Not only was I given a much harder course load than ever before, but I also started the year off with volleyball. This made my life so incredibly difficult. As if getting home from a game at 10 o’clock was not enough, I typically still had about an hour of homework to complete due to my honors classes. That season felt longer than a giraffes neck . From the long nights of homework, to the complete mental breakdowns, Freshman year was one of the worst experiences of my life.

The high school experience is something you'll never forget, even after graduating onto college and other careers. Toll Gate High School is a place where you learn who you are as a worker, but mostly as a person. Being in high school entails that teachers aren’t always going to be there to help with every situation or problem and that you have to fend for yourself with the large workload. This to me, was my wakeup call into true independence. Having independence is finally realizing that you are capable of doing things on your own without having somebody watching over you the entire time. After the eighth grade, I came to this realization. Whether the teacher was teaching the alphabet in kindergarten or teaching formal essays in eighth grade, I have always had teachers that would figuratively hold my hand with my work. I became so used to the fact that teachers would give me so much time for everything, that once I went to high school it just hit me. I have realized that I am fully capable of doing this, and the feeling of confidence turning in a report or paper will be genuine because it will be my accomplishment.

There was just such a deep feeling of dread when it came to my junior year. At the time I had been dealing with mental illness for quite some time and of course being a teenager who has had a mental illness for about four years it was so hard, especially when you have people who don't exactly see or understand what you're exactly going through. You feel very alone constantly and I really craved for change and I desperately wanted

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 remember the first day I started high school I was so nervous. As a kid I always remember I would had an anxiety problem for almost every little thing. I wake ever morning nauseated, even though there was nothing to worry about because I mean after all it was just school. I remember thinking damn I just got out of middle school here goes another 4 long school years. But what I didn’t know was that those years would go by so fast. After all like everyone says, a lot happens in 4years. On my first day everything was amazing. I had made new friends, so far I liked all my teachers, and I got into this Culinary Arts class that I didn’t even know I liked. I learned so much in Culinary, Everyday I would go in excited to see what I would learn the next.it amazed me so much I even started to help my mom cook, I learned so much in so little so that’s when I discovered I had a passion for learning how to cook and for food. I can honestly say I’m so glad I got into that class because now I know how to cook a little bit of Italian thanks to my culinary class and to wonderful godfather who is an excellent chef in New York City. I learn a lot from my mother who I’m forever thankful I just don’t tell her as much. Thanks to her I learn how to cook almost all kind of Mexican food, I learn how to be a little more responsible, I got into finishing my Diploma.

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.

A tradition at my high school for the senior class is choosing a city to spend a few days in before graduation. My class chose to go to Baltimore, Maryland. We had an action packed four days going to Adventure Park USA, Six Flags, The National Aquarium, a Baltimore Orioles game, The Smithsonian Zoo, and shopped around downtown Baltimore. I became close with classmates I rarely talked with throughout high school and saw a different side of them than what I had seen in the classrooms. My small circle of friends became even closer over the course of the week both individually and spiritually. My senior class trip to Baltimore was a memorable trip, a little chaotic, but it brought us closer together.

By High school, my friend group had competently changed. I sat at a different lunch table every day and some days would eat lunch with a teacher. Making lasting friendships was hard for me partly because I was shy. I had hoped my freshman year of making new friends on the soccer team. I faced my first real disappointment in my life when I did not make varsity and I made JV. The friends I was trying to make all played on varsity and I increasingly felt more alone and not worthy. My first three years of high school were pretty bleak. I did not have a social life outside of school. My happy place was going home and binge-watching Netflix after soccer practice. My junior year of high school was the toughest. I am dyslexic and have dyscalculia, so basically that means school is really hard for me. Junior year destroyed me in the classroom and to make matters worse, I also hurt my ankle taking me out of soccer the one outlet I had. I was angry because I was finally starting to play on varsity and score. I was heading to a bad place in my mind thinking the world had a personal vendetta against me. I knew I had to do something to change the path I was on because I could not keep living as a shell of a person. I decided in an act of desperation to sign up for church camp. I did not go to church anymore and my view of God was quite skewed. I believed there was a God because believing he created the world made the most logical sense to me, but I thought he had abandoned us on earth. I

I moved into residence at The University of Waterloo exactly 25 days ago. When I was starting High School, going to university was something I was sure I would never do; not because I thought I wouldn’t have adequate grades to get accepted, but because I thought it would be boring. This notion is rather atypical of a 12-year-old kid. As a high-schooler, it was ingrained into my mind at every possible opportunity that after High School I would go to university, and after graduating, I would start working for an employer. This is what everyone in my family, and everyone else that I grew up around did. Those around me who were successful made it there by getting an education. It’s what I believed I would do too, until I had a profound moment of realization on a family vacation in the 8th grade.

Being 5 feet tall, 90 pounds isn’t the ideal way to start high school, especially when you have plans to be a Division-1 student-athlete. If life were an elevator, my elevator was moving up through the floors at a frustratingly slower pace than those around me. I can attest that being picked last and left out can be quite a blow to one’s self-esteem. I have been on the “B” team and have felt that I wasn’t good enough to be out there on the field at all. The feeling, though, never quite sat right with me and I recognized early on that it was my challenge to overcome.

Why am I still here? There's no point in learning stupid facts and formulas. I’m sketching onto a generic college brochure. I hate being in this seminar. I don’t even want to go to college. I mean it’s pretty much pointless for an artist to attend university. Thankfully it’s easy to tune out the boring monotone voices surrounding me. High school is dragging on. I am a senior this year, but it feels like an eternity until graduation.

Starting off as a freshmen I was very quiet, I was scared of the teachers and classmates. Everyday was a struggle to get into the classrooms my body would shake, my hands would sweat, and my voice would tremble. Each and everyday felt like the first day of school. I hated the way I acted and looked at school as if it were a challenge. Being social became like solving a binary code. I could not figure out how to talk to people everyone made it seem so easy to connect to one another. I felt like a foreigner who did not know how to speak English. For the rest of the year I let myself be in isolation only speaking to my friends I have meet in middle school. As the new year came around I felt compelled to break the habit of being preserved. I went in with the intention of making at least four new friends. I knew it was something I needed to come out of if, I wanted to succeed in the near future and interacting was definitely needed for internships or job applications. Being very serious about wanting to grow as an individual I tried out for our school cheer. As I waited in line for a number to try out I was ready to just drop it and leave. My friend told me it was gonna be fine and I remained in line. As tryouts went on I felt so confident I was surprised myself. While learning the motions and dance I felt relieved. For the first time I was alive interacting with everyone who was trying out it was truly the time of my life. Two days later time to tryout came. I was me again.

Experiencing High school is where it all began for me. Of course my middles school teachers tried to make us all feel as if high school was going to be hard and a bit scarey, but it wasn’t until I was ending tenth grade and the beginning eleventh grade when i started feeling that way. I had an idea of what my future wanted to look like but didn’t know how or if I could get there, until I took a class called PFM (Personal Financial Management). My experience taking PFM taught me why i needed to get serious about what today millennials call “adulting”.

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.

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.