I’ve developed a new ritual this year. I do it every time I open my agenda. Flipping through my color-coded tabs to find the right page, I always catch myself wondering what it would feel like to get there and see absolutely nothing.
No messages to send, assignments to do or meetings to remember – I can only dream it. In the six months I’ve been a junior, there hasn’t been one day free of schoolwork. Sometimes, I open my laptop at dawn and barely take my eyes off it until well past midnight.
As juniors, we’re sprinting on the hamster wheel that is the road to higher education. Anyone will tell you it’s the year that really counts.
We worship the college admissions process. We strain through mind-numbing burnout and exhaustion in hope that some faceless admissions officer somewhere will be mildly impressed. At the same time, we hate the way it reduces us to the sum of all our accomplishments.
I want colleges to see me as more than one success-machine selected from many, rewarded for optimal performance during my high school trial-run.
But they don’t – they can’t. There are too many applicants and not enough time to get to know each one individually. Our applications are just summaries of our accomplishments, and students do anything to be the kid with the longest list, often at the expense of their mental health.
The title of “high achiever” should not come with assured mental harm.
Similarly, the most tangible mark of high school success should not be a severe lack of sleep. I’m an athlete outside of school and an honors/AP student. I’m in clubs. I have my service hours. I do all the things colleges say they want, and I do them at the expense of my eight hours.
The deficit has been deep since freshman year, but now, I feel like I’m doing homework by flashlight every night in the Mariana Trench of sleep deprivation, alongside all my other exhausted peers. Tiredness seems adjacent to an epidemic at EHS, and not just for juniors.
The sleep problem is compounded by near constant stress. AP and honors homework, honors society applications, ACT and SAT testing, college touring and more – why does it all have to be done within one year?
And truly, I’m grateful for everything I’ve learned this year, but there’s probably a path toward success that doesn’t involve weekly stress-induced migraines.
Here’s what I tell myself when I’m encroaching on that abyss beyond burnout: upper limits exist outside of pre-calculus. Your application might get you into college, but if your mental health issues are all-consuming, it’s not going to matter that you’re at your dream school. You’re going to regret it.
It’s frustrating that we have to put those limits on ourselves because those who define our success refuse to.
