It was not the vexatious reminders from my counselor, the ones telling me how far behind the rest of my peers I was, nor the stress I put on myself when the clock struck twelve that resparked the gears of motivation I had lost in the summer months that got me thinking of how I had fallen behind the whole college application season. The Blue and Gold opportunity plan was but a mere reminder in my path to plan my future and that Santa Clara honors program only resparked my level of anxiety but did little to spark my interest in the forthcoming.  I failed to prepare for what are supposed to be the “best years of my life” and instead placed greater importance on the color of my nail polish for the next week than on the difficulty of my classes for the next four years--which really wouldn’t matter if I spent all of my time looking up random YouTube tutorials.

The college fair struck me much like the evidence of the earth’s roundness struck the priests and fathers of the 16th century. Not only did I refuse to accept at first that my philosophy of not having to think about schools until the month of application submissions would work out in my favor, but I realized too that the world was not going to cater to me and somehow open up amazing opportunities without me taking the initial leap to self motivation.  It was then that I began to appreciate all the days that I was mentally drilled by my counselor with the same four questions regarding next year.

After an eternity spent “researching” (looking up acceptance rates to different schools and further looking into the fifty to seventy percent range), I came to realize something.  I answered one of the questions that flow in the blood of anyone who is human, I realized that the more I knew, the less I wanted to know.  Sitting at my kitchen table with my outdated MacBook Pro and some kind of tea next to me for two-hour sessions began to take a bigger toll on my mental health state than did the crash of the stock market on the United States in the early nineteen-hundreds.  Not only did my fear of not getting accepted anywhere enhance by the tick of the hand, but my lack of preparation and commitment to my future made me feel like a dump truck not only hit me, but it picked me up in the process to save me the struggle of getting myself there.   I binged on college information for too many days in a row that only an even bigger worry could act as my bucket of ice water; this being the realization that anything I had done for the actual preparation towards college was mediocre and insufficient.

With my extremely flexible stress meter reaching its favorite spot on the chart: mental breakdown, I finally began to accept my slack offish, borrowed personality and took it to mean that I was reaching that moment of now-or-never.  Now with a more serious mindset I plan to attack the politics of high school  for this final year with the same purposeful superiority complex as I do any of life’s other struggles so as to avoid loosing my hair and getting a permanent twitch.