(Dis) Connection

By Livinia Menon

It’s easy to get lost in the work we have, it’s easy to forget why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s easy to only focus on what seems important now. But what is hard, is laying in your bed at night and realising that you don’t know why you’re doing what you are. College applications, SAT exams, AP exams, tests, quizzes, the homework that’s due first block tomorrow, they all just seem like pieces of the cognitive overload accumulating at the back of your brain. You don’t go out anymore, you decline invitations to hang out, and it isn’t until you’re standing on stage receiving your high school diploma that you realise you never really did experience high school at all.

That’s the nightmare that haunts every high school student, the urge to do our best in academics overriding the high school experience itself. It’s the sugar crash after Halloween, the sick feeling after eating all your candy. We are all bound to burn up if we get lost in the storm of work. We don’t all realise this, as Anya Kaloo (11) said, “ It wasn’t until I stopped competitive training for martial arts and being unable to make time for friends in and out of school that I realised it was because I was dedicating myself to the high demands of keeping up my grades at the level I desired.”

As November flies past us, there is no doubt that deadlines will start catching up, making us all busier and increasingly tired. What we have to remember in times like this is that we aren’t going through all this alone. Our friends and classmates are all going through the same thing, and even if you do have that AP Statistics test on Wednesday, you aren’t going to fail if you take time to relax with your friends for a few hours that weekend. Because at the end of it, you only go through high school once. The people surrounding you now aren’t going to be with you forever, so it’s just as important to make those memories as it is to earn that grade you want.

Sleep that extra hour, say yes to that invitation, and maybe even write that essay the day it’s assigned. If we start managing our time right, we might find that we have a lot more opportunities to do the things we love with the people we love.