I was good at School

For as long as I can remember, academics have been the center of my life. In high school other kids were good at sports or music or theatre. I was good at school. I made it my mission in life to excel in academics and push myself to be the best in every subject. Looking back now, this was such a toxic mindset to have during what should have been the most carefree time in my life.

Instead of enjoying my time as a regular teenager, I saddled myself with rigorous classes and forced myself to be a model student in every way possible. That meant that on top of my academic responsibilities I also had to join as many extracurricular clubs as possible to be a “well-rounded” student. Adding to this stress was the peer competition. At my high school, the graduating class recognizes the top ten students with the highest weighted GPA. In a class of over four hundred, the competition was intense. I’d known since my Freshman year of high school that I wanted to be in this elusive Top Ten. When rankings came out that year, I was number seventeen. I had never felt so worthless.

For the next three years I pushed myself to be the best, taking as many AP and honors classes as I could to bump up my weighted GPA. It was like puzzle or a game. Which classes could I take to gain those precious GPA points? Who was ahead of me in the rankings? How could I do better than them? It seemed like the only thing my friends and I ever talked about was school: who got a B on the last Chemistry test, who was behind on their volunteer hours, who had gotten into Vanderbilt early action. We were absolutely obsessive.

Slowly, I inched my way closer and closer to my target. But this success came at a price. I was always stressed; between my class load, my extracurriculars, and a part-time job, I constantly felt like I was on the edge of a complete melt-down. I can remember so many instances of just sitting in my room and crying because of how stressed I was. Eventually, I began to link my self-worth to my grades, causing my self-esteem to become a dangerous rollercoaster of highs and lows. My senior year of high school I got an eighty percent, a B, on an English paper and—I can’t believe I’m actually writing this, but—spent the rest of the day actually contemplating suicide because of how utterly worthless I felt. In retrospect, I realize that that was insane—wanting to kill myself over a B!—but in the moment it made perfect sense. No one had ever taught me how to accept failure; everything was all about success, success, success! Looking back now, my mental health in high school was dangerously terrible, but I was so good at hiding it that no one ever noticed. I worked hard to keep up my image and made sure that no one ever glimpsed the struggle underneath.

In the end, I achieved my goal. I graduated ranked eighth in my class, but as I look back on my high school career this accomplishment seems hollow. I put myself through four years of stress and jeopardized my mental health on so many occasions for a goal that I now realize matters very little. Thankfully, college has helped me to change the way I think about academics. I’m not nearly as obsessive as I used to be, and I feel so much freer because of this.