With every school year that passes by I end up surprising myself with what I learn and what I become. Before I know it, an improved Reese is formed as a product of lessons learned from a multitude of new experiences and problems that I have overcome. No matter what issues you have, they make you a stronger, smarter, and all around improved individual.
Over the past year, I've undergone a little bit too much stress due to issues related to schoolwork, but it was because of this that I think I learned one of the biggest life lessons: The most important thing in life is to be happy. This may seem like a quite basic and obvious lesson, but it never truly struck me as important until I went through my last stretch of high school.
My whole life I've considered myself to be strictly academic. I took IB classes in high school and was always extremely cautious about keeping my grades high. School was the biggest part of my life. It's what I was always good at. I put school before most aspects of my life, and considered academics to be the forefront of the most important things on the earth.
Junior year was when things began to become serious for the IB program, I had to take on a lot of exams, projects, and extra curricular activities, so much in fact that my schedule would become incredibly booked and I would have trouble keeping up with all the things I had to complete each week. On top of that, it was when I started taking serious looks into universities, and I went into stress overload trying to keep my grades at abnormally high standards, even though I would've gotten near the same scholarships without putting all that stress on myself. I didn't cut myself a lot of slack.
My perspective began to switch when I approached my senior year. My overpacked work schedule brought me to the point of mental breakdown more times than I’d like to admit, but even though it was an awfully stressful year for me, it was also extremely enlightening. Looking for something to keep my mind off of my schoolwork, I became so much more social. Making new friends really saved my mental health, because it taught me the importance of maintaining a life outside of work. I began to go to more social events, take more road trips, spend more time with friends, and value the importance of a solid relationship. I became a much more fun-loving, jubilant, and free-spirited person than the overly-stressed and serious person that I was being previously. The more I began to switch my priorities from academics to friendship, the more I began to see the flaws in how I was living life previously.
The problem I've had this whole time was that I felt like I had to be overly studious for the sake of maintaining a status that I've kept for myself since I started school that I'm a smart person who does all the honors classes and makes good grades. I soon became aware of how unhappy it was actually making me and of how absurd it was that I was continuing to do something that made me feel this way for little to no reason.
Therefore, as I began to step further and further away from this mentality of mine by becoming more recreational, I began to become more aware of the wrongs which surrounded my lifestyle of strict academics, in that it made no room for happiness and thus severely damaged my mental well-being. Of course I firmly believe that to reach what makes you happy there are going to be times where you have to work on things that are stressful and tough to deal with, and a proper education is a very crucial part to our growth as humans, but in the path that I was headed, my academic habits were too extreme to make the means justify the end product.
As you can see, I did not favor the way I was previously living my life because of how I overly prioritized my academic life over anything else. However, I would not say that I REGRET a thing that I've done in the past. Without those issues, I would not have gone out of my way to improve my social life to the extremity that I did my senior year. And without that, I would have never understood the true importance of a balanced life, strong relationships, and a positive mental health to the extent that I do now. And now, thanks to the hardships that I've overcome, I can say that I'm a much better and smarter individual than I was previously
