grieving high school

It’s crazy when I look back at my high school years and realize what twisted cycle of a hamster wheel I’d been lost in. Plainly put, I didn’t like high school. Don’t tell anyone I said this — everyone who peaked will give me crap for it. There is an abundance of sensible reasons to hate the secondary school scene, but let me begin with the daily restlessness: the constant need to be great, to prove myself, to be a kid that adults looked at and would say “you have a bright future ahead of you.”

Ironically, college got better. It took the liberal UP culture and the streets of Taft to make me look at life with new eyes. Social constructs dictate that university life is harder. But while my coursework today remains challenging, I find the college setting better. I have never not been an organized person, but for some reason, I preferred every shapeless UP practice over my high school’s structured routines. Many are intimidated by the independence of a UP education, but I found myself flourishing through each semester.

Not to brag (I am, but no one’s reading this anyway), but my grades came out yesterday and I happen to be a university scholar! In UP, this is a recognition when you have a grade point average of 1.45 and above. I said that so you’d recognize that I am indeed accomplished to some degree, and not just some wannabe Rory Gilmore. This semester was far from easy, so how I managed to pull this off is beyond me. You see, I was taking Econ 11 — it’s one of the hardest classes in our program. Even the professor is notorious for banning calculators and failing students. As an innately numerically challenged woman, I nearly wanted to draw coquette bows on the supply and demand graphs halfway through the midterms. Seriously speaking, I’ve been praying for a university scholar ever since, but given the circumstances, I was expecting a college scholar average.

However, it’s not the Econ 11 that strikes me as the toughest hindrance so far. It happened last year, May 31st of 2023, when I couldn’t help but cry over this is me trying. It was the accumulation of tasks I couldn’t handle. I had a paper due today, an exam tomorrow, and another on the day after. Time management was useless because my instructors themselves had been late in providing us with paper instructions or details. There was no time to rest and I felt myself getting burnt out.

Would you believe me if I said that the single moment of sheer exhaustion in university was like a monthly episodic breakdown in high school? Heartbreaking, isn’t it? I’d only been 15 or 16, but I had my eyes set on the future. I know now that I should have been enjoying life much more than I’d been focused on school. Looking back, I didn’t like the high school setup to begin with. This isn’t to say that my school was horrible — let me be clear, I had really fun memories from high school; more so, my teachers and the quality of education were top-tier. However, I never liked the routines, the activities we did, how we were taught to interact with one another, the authoritarian upbringing, and what was deemed outstanding in high school lingo.

In college — in UP — I just feel free. I can be happy about my love for learning without feeling the pressure to achieve something.

If I could go back in time and talk to my fifteen-year-old self, I’d tell her to get off that hamster wheel and start enjoying life a little more. This is what I am most grateful for in college: balance. I have finally learned how to enjoy life as it is, in the now, in all of its parts. I’d tell her that she needn’t impress anyone else but our five-year-old and eighty-five-year-old self. Even so, I would thank her for being the strongest person I know. It is because of her stubbornness and grit that I am in the university I’ve always wanted. It is because of her that I have grown to become a better person.