Daily Life Thoughts
During the years at elementary school, I had a happy relationship with education. Math was just learning how to add and subtract numbers. English was the introduction of the alphabet and how to spell words. Teachers gave out gold stars to the students who behaved and scolded the troublemakers. Easy. As a middle schooler, small amounts of homework were taken home to do on the weekend, and classes separated themselves into six subjects. There was no playground but there were balls to play volleyball, basketball, etc. As a junior in high school, school became a literal nightmare. Homework and projects overloaded the weekends, chipping away my social life. Quizzes appeared every two weeks with a test after that. Junior year was the beginning of preparing for the future and studying for the SATs. There was no time. Not enough days nor hours to reach the deadline. And throughout all this workload, the thought that lingered in my mind and spoken through the mouths of my exasperated peers was “kill me now.”
I don’t know when that particular expression became prevalent throughout the school, but many students, especially those in AP classes, often jokingly say this phrase. Now, I’m not saying this matter applies to the entire student body, but it made me wonder: if school was the best place to learn, how has the school environment affected student’s mental health as each year passed by? Everything seemed fine in elementary. Where did it go wrong in high school?
In truth, it is the stress from the realization that growing up is turning into a reality for many high school students. It’s the realization that college is coming, adulthood is coming, and time isn’t slowing down to allow us to cherish the few moments of our innocent childhood left. Instead, time only seems to be speeding up. For Holden Caulfield, this is the dilemma he faces. The book, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, is about Holden Caulfield, a 16 year old who flunked out of Pencey Prep. He saw adults as phonies and children as innocent. Throughout the book, he also experienced loneliness and depression as he tried to run away from his problems. In one scene, when he asked a cab driver where ducks went in the winter, the cab driver changed the subject to what happened to the fishes in winter by saying they “get frozen right in one position for the whole winter.” By doing so, it acknowledges that Holden is at a loss of what he should do with his life. He’s stuck between his childhood and adulthood, constantly going back and forth, not knowing which one to accept.
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Like Holden, we fear how the future will turn out and there’s no way to control it. Life becomes more difficult and we can barely keep up. The pressure from parents, teachers, and even strangers to have the future ready is harmful to the mind of teenagers. It influences us to believe that if the future isn’t set, then it means we have no future. That we’re just failures. Some teenagers may already planned out what they wanted to do and be in the next ten years. I wanted to become a pediatrician and help people. However, all of us don’t really have a clue. Even if we mapped out the future, meticulously pathing a way to reach our goal as an adult, we don’t know the outcome of it. The future is scary and unpredictable, and at times, it’s depressing to even think about. Debt. Responsibility. Money. Food. They’re all the things that we will have to face as adults alone. Right now, Holden and us are just the fishes frozen in the lake — unsure of where to go and how to handle the future that is approaching. Lost. Maybe it’s why depression hangs over the school.
For most high school students, the definite path towards the future and attending the best universities begins with taking many AP classes. With my own experience in taking APs and the thoughts of wanting to die because of it, it furthered my curiosity over mental health. Why do we willingly put ourselves in AP classes, knowing the mental toll it would take on us and depriving us of our precious sleep? According to Swaminathan, from his blog post Avoid AP Course Overload: It May Matter Less Than You Think, it’s due to the higher “chances of admission to more selective or prestigious colleges.” I believe that since the beginning of our education, we’ve been put up against each other, competing to see who was intelligent or not. It’s the possible inferiority complex that we unconsciously developed as we got older, leading us to believe that we had to be the best out of everyone by studying endlessly and acing exams. We don’t want to study for hours, but we will to be the best. Despite the reassurance with teachers saying grades won’t matter in a few years (which it probably won’t), as students, we focus on the present. For us, it’s the things that happen now that matters. Grades and competition wear down our minds, making many of us believe we are never good enough. What’s wrong with me? Just kill me now to get everything over with. That constant loop of feeling inferior worsens in school as we watch others excel before us and we feel left behind. From the jokes we make about death, it seems a little more real later on.
But why do we, teenagers who had yet to experience the world of adulthood, choose death to comfort our hardships? Is it because we want to break out of the cage that school placed on us to live in the peace of dark abyss? David Foster Wallace, in his speech This Is Water, talked about as humans, we naturally think we’re the center of everything; the world revolves around us and our problems. Maybe teenagers are too selfish. Maybe they are justified to be selfish. We consciously set aside the importance of our well being and health to focus on education. Sleepless nights pass and the rings under our eyes get darker as we hope to see a rise in our GPA. Nowadays, we busy ourselves with extracurricular activities to have a remarkable college application and become so stressed that death seems like an easy way out. We fall into this pattern of solely blaming the school for deteriorating our mental health and causing anxiety, when we, the students, are also apart of the problem. We overlook the fact that we put ourselves into these stressful situations and that we contribute the negativity to the school environment. When you can’t get a grip on the events happening around you, you blame the world for your problems. You lose hope in your abilities, leading to self-blame and helplessness. All that’s left is the thought of death.
However, what keeps us going when we hit rock bottom? I believe it’s due to this one trait that we were born with — resilience. Through the streams of homework, tests, and projects, we push through and continue on. We sigh when our pencils begin fill the blanks of the worksheets with answers and sigh when we submit them to the teacher. Resilience is the protector that keeps us from the border of death. Holden Caulfield feels depressed and lonesome multiple times, but he continues his search in finding a person he could make a connection with to break down his walls of isolation. Without resilience, a person would have given up on walking because they didn’t like falling to the ground as a baby. They would have given up their voice because pronouncing words was hard as a toddler. Everything that went through trial and error only strengthened our resilience. It becomes the key factor that help adjust us into adulthood as we encounter the ups and downs that come along with it. Maybe this is the reason why all of us had not succumbed into the chaos of our minds.
