As a second-semester Senior, I am finding the road ahead far more nuanced and vertiginous than I expected. Get into a good college. Get a good job. I don’t know. The metrics of success I held for myself no longer seem so abiding. I keep listening to Mitski's ``Working for the Knife,” and can’t seem to get, “I used to think I'd be done by twenty. Now at twenty-nine, the road ahead appears the same'' out of my head. I imagined once I got into the right school with the right grades, everything would fall into place, and the blanket of certainty would envelop me in warmth and placid comfort. Now that I’ve reached the top of the high school mountain, I only see more Mount Everests ahead. Warning, underclassmen, “be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it” (Eminem).
I worked under the illusion that success would look like me going to a rigorous undergraduate program and approaching my four years of high school like I would get no second chances. In my sophomore year of high school, Mike Ireland (or Iron Mike, as he is best known by his physics students) started giving me tutorial tickets for how many days I could come into office hours. However, I am finding that success lies elsewhere. The more attention I’ve paid to my priorities, overall health, and personal pleasure in the mundane, everything else has fallen into place. Simply by realigning my priorities in life, my semester GPA has never been higher, I’ve never been so relaxed, and I’ve never been so surprised at myself. Like the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison says, “If you wanna fly, you got to give up the s*&t that weighs you down" (Morrison).
When you achieve success or encounter failure in life, people will act as if it were an inevitable conclusion. In reality, it's up to you. Richard Branson, the billionaire CEO of the Virgin conglomerate, was considered a failure in his high school years. In an interview with Danielle Wiener-Bronner, Branson says, “I was seen as the dumbest person at school. The idea that I could be successful, especially with my dyslexia, didn’t dawn on me then,” (Branson). Additionally, inventor-of-the-lightbulb Thomas Edison was told by his teachers in school that he was “too stupid to learn anything” (blah.) To top it off, the great impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh’s work was considered so terrible in his time that he was only able to sell one painting in his thirty-seven years–The Red Vingard–seven months before he died.
As someone who has been told her whole life, “You’re gonna be someone great,” I’m just about sick of it. Just in the past few days, there are teachers who have come up to me with collegiate congratulations who actively disparaged my abilities and were praying for my downfall every day of class. You can have C’s and get degrees. You can make great grades and be a failure. You can try your best to plan for the future, and life will still have its way with you, whether you like it or not. If there was one piece of advice I’d implore you to remember, it’s this: identify what matters most, tune out the BS, and run with it. That’s all that really matters. And the rest? It’ll work itself out.
- Parker, Editor