After spending twelve years (eleven if you don't include pre-school) of my life dedicating 180 days of each year towards school and my education, all of my efforts are finally starting to show it's product. In less than one year, I'll be crossing the stage along with many of my peers that I have grown up with, and have changed with throughout the years. We all have one thing in common, which is that none of us have lost sight of earning one of the most important achievements there is to earn in these days: a high school diploma. I suppose not all of us haven't followed a perfect route to this goal, but I think that's one thing that has really made each one of us original and unique. It's amazing to see how much each one of us have progressed so much from the young freshmen we once were, including myself. I remember first starting here at SSFHS and having little to no aspirations or plans for my futures, which was odd because I had done exceptionally well in middle school (I promoted with a 4.0 throughout the entire three years I was there). Perhaps it was mainly the people I surrounded myself with that made this effect on me, none of them really had the ambition or motivation to do well in school, and even today, very view are doing well with it, if they are even still in school at all.
This is the year that I'm finally taking initiative and setting the bar high in order to reach my dream career (I hope to either work in the medical-anthropology field or something along the lines of being a teen-doctor). However, from the end of my freshman year up until now, I have been progressing to the choices that I am now making this year. I decided to take two AP classes (calculus and biology), and to focus more on what I can do to help my community (along with that, trying to find ways to help the world as a whole). I've always had a more "radical" approach on different topics, such as feminism, animal rights, racial equality, etc. and I've been trying my best to share my views with the rest of the world. From the time when I first started making realizations about "the way things are" and began determining my ethics, I mainly alienated myself from the things I viewed as "wrong", rather than trying to find ways to stop it. This year, and I hope to continue with this for the rest of my life, I'm striving to bring awareness to these topics and inform others in ways they can stop bullying, harassing, or creating a prejudice/stereotype. What many teens don't understand is that there are really simple things that they can change in their life/lifestyle that could create much less harm than they currently are (such as their vocabulary, for example, using racial/sexual slurs). I often bring up these topics up in a casual way with my friends/peers, and most of them are able to see things from my point of view.
Furthermore, I've set a fitness/health goal for myself, that I've been continuing since the summer. It's really difficult to balance, school, exercise, and hanging out with friends, so I've mainly been participating in the first two. Lately, I've just been going to school and working out on the weekdays, and volunteering at the library and working out on the weekends. It's probably not something that most people would look forward to, but for the most part, I enjoy what I am doing right now, and I know that there are many good rewards to come from working hard. I usually spend my leisure time going to "shows", which are somewhat like concerts, but on a much smaller scale, and involve underground music. I'm laughed right now while re-reading the beginning of this paragraph and realized that the quote "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" has really defined my lifestyle right now, and it's hard to argue that I don't feel stressed out often. Going to shows is my catharsis, and I think it balances out all the stress I'm embedded in throughout the school-week.
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