There comes a time in every high schooler’s life where something happens that could impact them for a while. Maybe they just got their heart broken, or lost a good friend. Maybe they got injured pretty badly or maybe they stopped doing what they love, only to regret it. But no matter what, it’s a change.
Instead of sitting around and dwelling on that change and shutting everyone around you out, you have to get up and move on. You have to remember that whatever you’re going through right now is completely temporary and you have to be willing to embrace the hurt just for a little bit. If you don’t let yourself feel the pain, you’re never going to be able to move on from it. But you can’t let that pain consume you.
A lot of times, for high school students, one bad thing happens and suddenly, their entire world comes crashing down. Lets say your dog died last week and a few days later, you bomb your first test of the year and you start to get super stressed out. You begin to dig yourself so deep into this hole because you feel as if you have hit rock bottom. You begin to feel overwhelmed by your own grief so you decide to stop hanging out with your friends and skip out on a few homework assignments. “It’s okay if I miss just this one, I’m a good student.” But one homework assignment turns into ten, and suddenly you don’t even know what act you’re on in Hamlet. Getting consumed in all of the missed work is eventually just going to keep you from going to the Friday night football game you were looking forward to, or instigate an argument with your parents.
What a lot of high schoolers don’t realize is, had they not let the pain of their dogs death consume their life, they would be at that football game right now because the one homework assignment wouldn’t have turned into ten. They wouldn’t be in so deep because of a tragedy that was bound to happen at some point.
I’m not saying you’re not allowed to hurt. Everybody is allowed to hurt, everybody should hurt. But it’s one thing to hurt and it’s another thing to let the hurt consume your life.
Pain is most certainly a thing and pain is most definitely an issue. It’s up to you, though, on how much of an issue you let it become.
Some people absolutely hate everything about high school. Graduation can’t come soon enough; but those people that hate it don’t realize that high school is only about 1500 days. That’s 1500 days out of around 30000. That’s roughly 5% of your life.
So yes, sometimes bad things happen to good people. Good people who don’t deserve the pain and the grief, but it’s completely inevitable. Trauma happens, tragedy happens. It happens to the best of us, and it happens to the worst of us. But no matter what, you can’t lose sight of what matters. You can’t let yourself drown in your own pity. You have to be strong for yourself and other people around you.
High school isn’t the best time for everyone, but it’s not the worst for everyone either. No matter what happens, you’ve just gotta keep doing you. You’ve gotta rise above the sadness and the high school drama and the rumors. You have the let yourself be happy and focus on the good stuff. Life is only as good as you make it, or as bad as you make it. The final choice is all yours.
