I wish I someone had told me these words when I was a teenager
Friday, July 19, 2013, ϟ 0 shout(s)
"The more I talk to people and hear about their experiences and compare them with mine, the more convinced I am that people should take a year to two years off between high school and college.
Because let’s be real: you don’t know what you want out of life at seventeen. You don’t have a fucking clue who you are. The amount of people I know who got to college at eighteen and had complete emotional breakdowns is insane, and yet they’re treated as failures. They’re treated as weak because they couldn’t handle it. And that is so beyond unfair and makes me so incredibly angry, I can barely even see straight.
We’re not given time to grow up. The person I was at eighteen and the person I am now at twenty-four are lightyears away from one another—you do so much changing in those years, and yet you’re expected to juggle a crazy schedule and an insane workload and, in many cases, a job on top of it. And people wonder why so many people get out of college and flounder, or end up in jobs they hate living totally unfulfilling lives. Or, in my case, completely flame out from the get-go and end up spending years trying to recover.
If you’re in high school and you’re reading this, I’m going to tell you something I wish more than anything someone had told me when I was in school: not going to college straight out of school does not make you a failure. It does not mean you will never go, or never make anything out of yourself.
What’s important is that you are happy, that you give yourself the chance to grow up and figure out what you really want out of life. Spend a few months screwing around. Get a part-time job, if you don’t have one already. Blow a year or two making some cash and hanging out with your friends and reading books and trying new things. Be a fucking kid for a while, and then sort your shit out.
You do not need to have your life together before you’re twenty-five. Most people don’t, even the ones who do go to college right off the bat—sometimes especially the ones who do go to college right off the bat.
Fuck your parents. Fuck your teachers. You are important. Your worth comes from your experiences and your thoughts and your actions, not your GPA. Not your shitty job. And don’t you fucking dare let anyone make you think otherwise.
-Written by luciferious of Tumblr.
I wish I had the strength and the wisdom back then that it was okay to fail and not to pressure myself to be one of the 'best'. School ruined me. A lot. And don't tell me it was my fault. I tried my very best everyday that I got so stressed that I had a breakdown when I was only 13 or 14 but I didn't allow myself to stop for a while because I know the stigma of having depression and having a low grade in school. Maybe it was pride, maybe I just can't accept that a previous honor student from nursery to grade 6 can't even get into the top 5 or top 10 anymore.
My self hate that I am not what I used to be in school continued until college. I admit I already know what I want but I wished I had the chance to take a rest, to sort things out, to know if my chosen course is what I really want. I don't want to say that I regret taking up Journalism but then a part of me keeps bugging me, making me think on how I wasted my college life in that school, with those professors and minor subjects that didn't really matter. If I really had the knowledge back then, I might have taken Literature or Creative Writing and also a short Paralegal program.
Some people might suggest that I shall study again. The sad thing is I don't want to go back to school anymore. My goal right now is to have the job I really want even though it is not related to my course.
Labels: ramblings
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