this will be graded in the next 24 hours, right?

It is 8:27 p.m. on Sunday, March 20th, 2016. I got home an hour and a half ago after being in Seattle, my hometown, since Thursday morning. I’ve hardly slept this weekend. I feel sick. I have to wake up in nine hours.

I got to go away for the weekend. I got to see where my mom went to college. I got to celebrate my grandpa’s 91st birthday. I got to see my cousins, who happen to be three of my favorite humans in the world, who I have missed terribly. It was a break; a fresh exit from the stressful reality that has grown to be my life. Going back to Seattle always calms me down—whether it’s the people I’m with or the sights I see or even just the simplicity in the abundance of trees alongside the road, I always seem to feel at peace when I’m there. The only problem is that when I leave, that peace stays behind.

a picture I took on the way to my cousin's house

Twenty four hours ago, I was asleep, only to wake back up again at 1:36 a.m. when my cousin Madison returned from Tolo (the Pacific Northwest’s version of Sadie Hawkins). Twenty four hours before that, I was watching my cousins’ and I’s favorite movies, and twenty four hours before that I was doing something else and twenty four hours before that I was doing something else. 

Time is moving uncontrollably fast, too fast for me to catch up. Every day drags on endlessly, but looking back, it feels like 2016 hasn’t even started and I’m still stuck in late August of 2015. Ever since the week before school started, everything has been a blur. And if you don’t understand what that means, then let me try to explain it: I feel like I’ve been stuck in time for the past seven months. I can hardly tell the difference between days and I’ve run out of ways to talk to people about it. 

Basically, in the grand scheme of things, I’m trying to say that my entire mental health has gone to hell since school started. This is nothing new, it happens every year. I’m not surprised that it happened again, even though I’m always hopeful otherwise. But I’d like to publicly state that I am not the only student going through this.

Earlier today I felt this feeling—this numb feeling I’ve been describing, where I shut down and lose all sense of feeling—and I desperately asked my best friend what to do about it. She admitted to me that she also felt this feeling, and specifically mentioned that this feeling occurs when at school/dealing with school. Like we’re waiting for something in our lives, but we don’t know what. Like the only way we’re getting through life is by distracting ourselves. And this, by first hand experience, seems like the worst way to go through life, as I’ve mentioned in one of my previous blog posts. 

When it gets to the point where students would rather hibernate from the world than get up and ride the bus one more time you know there’s a flaw in the system. When it gets to the point where students are living in a constant state of depression and anxiety and can’t help but try to hide it from everyone, that is when you know there is a flaw in the system. When it gets to the point where students are expected to get at least eight hours of sleep at night but are kept up cramming in schoolwork to keep up their GPA’s, that is when you know there is a flaw in the system. When it gets to the point that kids are having physical panic attacks worrying about if their 'A' will turn into an 'A-' (I'm not exaggerating, this is fucking reality), that is when you know there is a flaw in our system.

It is now 10:11 p.m.. Twenty four hours ago, I was asleep. Twelve hours from now, I will be in second period. I am exhausted. My head hurts. I should have been asleep two hours ago, not writing this. But hey, at least I turned it in on time, right?

forgotten memories

Does it scare you that your entire life is in the past?

The breath you just took, the sixty-fifth math class you’ve taken this year, your favorite song that you just finished listening to for the hundredth time. The time you went cliff jumping at your cabin, the era of your life when you used to be obsessed with baking miniature cupcakes, the day you met your best friend. Everything that has ever happened to you is in the past, even the things that happened 0.0000001 seconds ago. Your entire life is nothing but a memory. You are a walking participle of the past.

The scary part about that is that you don’t remember all of your life, either. You have forgotten things that have happened to you, things you have said or done. In twenty years, you won’t remember this blog post, or what you wore on January 23rd, or how many times you’ve cut your hair. You won’t remember any of it. I believe that’s pretty selfish of us human beings to only remember ‘the important things’.

A little while ago, four of my longtime best friends (Jen, Alexa, and Tori) were joking about something that happened at this hilarious sleepover we had when we were kids—and I couldn’t remember it. I tried and tried to rack my brain, searching every corner to try and picture it, but I couldn’t do it. I remembered all of our other sleepovers.

Tori, Alexa, Jen and I at
the Bite of Seattle last summer

I remember Alexa and I’s first playdate, when we threw water down my wooden hallway and slid on our knees to create an Indoor Waterslide. I remember sitting with Jen and her brother JJ as he defeated Robot Patrick in the Spongebob Game while simultaneously arguing over what the largest number in the world was (we had decided on ‘infinity google plux’). 

I remember the day Tori moved to Tennessee—I was sitting at the bottom of my driveway with tears in my eyes as she ran out of her parents’ car and tackled me in a hug. She pulled a piece of Dubble Bubble gum out of her pocket and wrapped it in my hands. I started to cry, because she remembered that Dubble Bubble gum was my favorite. And then, she drove away and left.

I remembered everything else but what they were laughing about. It killed me because that memory was important to them and I had carelessly forgotten it, as if it didn’t matter. I have too many memories to even name, and each of them mean so much to me. My memories are my biggest treasures and to think of losing them could bring me to tears. 

This terrifies me. The idea of forgetting a good memory is petrifying because these are your memories and they define your life story. I exist, I ought to owe it to someone to be able to remember and be blessed for all of the good times I’ve had, and it’s not in my place to forget. No one else knows you better than you know yourself. You may share memories with other people, but they always mean something different to them than they mean to you.

a wake-up call

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re wasting your life?

You wake up at 6. You get on the bus at 6:45 and ride until you get to school at 7:15, then you go to class and learn things (sometimes) and are handed busy work and told to complete it in the next two days. Then you go to three more classes and eat lunch and go home and go to your activities and do your homework and go to bed and sleep for a couple hours until you repeat it again the next day and the day after that and the day after that. The things you want to be doing are pushed off another day, and you spend your limited hours in a classroom or in bed. The days feel so long but yet there’s still never enough hours in a day. How is this possible?

Sometimes you get a taste of change, say you go to a friend’s house after school, or your mom makes your favorite meal for dinner, or your favorite band releases a new album, and your daily routine is shaken up a tiny bit. You enjoy it, because this opportunity doesn’t always appear. But once the moment is over, all you want to do is experience another change, which is unfortunate because your routine begins again the next morning and another repetitive day has come and gone and you find yourself going insane until you get to the point of breaking, where if you have to wake up and do the same things one more time you will start screaming.

The problem is that when you’re going through life like this, you usually know what you want. You have this list—whether it’s physical or mental—of things you want to do before you die, and as each day passed, the thin dust layer on top of it gets thicker and thicker. Slumped in a desk at 8:23 in the morning, feeling as if you haven’t slept in weeks, you think to yourself, “I wish I could be road tripping up and down the west coast, not sitting here watching this boring geography movie” or coming home from practice late at night thinking, “I wish I could have time to see my friends during the day”.  I think it’s harder knowing what you want and knowing you’re so far away from the physical possibility of accomplishing that. All you want is to reach out your hand and start steering the direction your life the way you want to, and you can’t.

the map of a person who's travelled everywhere

Humans have made life so complicated. The mere purpose for life is to go to college so you can get a good paying job so you can have a lot of money. Yikes, right? People give up values of family and friendship and work themselves until they are bitter and coldhearted—and for what? Aren’t there more important things than financial stability? Money is a necessity but it is not everything. Life should be much simpler than what everyone has made it out to be; do you really have to scream and stomp your foot if the barista accidentally messed up your order? Do you really have to complain about what that girl is wearing behind her back or how it’s not snowing as much as you’d like it to be? Humanity has grown to be hard and mean and we need to stop pretending like we’re going to live forever. 

Maybe I opened up your horizons a bit. If not, that’s alright. Maybe you are perfectly content with your life, and if that’s so, then good for you; I aspire to reach that point someday. All I hope, for my sake, is that someday I will be able to accomplish that dusted-over list imprinted in the back of my mind and begin to live the way I know I deserve to.