Tears fall down my cheeks. The tight feeling in my throat grows and my chest tightens. My eyes stare at the paper, reading over the grades. They come to a stop. The sudden realization that my grades aren’t where I envisioned them to be hits me. And it hits me hard.

Freshman year of high school is daunting for some, even scary at first. This was true for me but, after a while, it wasn’t all that bad. Things changed, and they changed drastically.

The friends I considered the closest distanced themselves, and the anxieties in my mind somehow got worse. However, I didn’t let these small obstacles get in my way at first. I just kept going, kept trying.

Over the summer, I let all my worries go, and I made new friends. In a way, I just shut off the part of me that was causing problems, a decision that, in short, was good, but in the long run it turned out to be a mistake.

Sophomore year rolled around and I was somehow different– at least I noticed that I wasn’t the same. The assigned book still sat on my dresser collecting dust, the drive to succeed was missing.

This was unusual considering that I always strived to perform to my best abilities and dedicated hours to homework and studying in order to achieve the best grades. These previous goals found themselves at the bottom of my priorities.

The first two weeks of school had gone by and the drive to try kept lessening. Dodging the responsibilities of high school and simply just living life was my new motive. A horrible one many would say, but it was just what my life had become.

I let all the drama roll off of my back, along with the influence of others. I had slowly let go of the person who did nothing but homework to make all A’s slowly disappear. I was in a state of not caring what I was doing, not listening in class, blowing off the notes for world history, not even trying.

I was stuck, I knew that if I kept in the direction I was going, it wouldn’t end well. It was when I received my report card that I realized what was going on with me.

It was that moment that I knew something needed to change, I needed to get out of my head and just look at the positives in my life, not the past mistakes and missed opportunities.

Steps were taken to make my new goal accessible. I stopped going out as much, stopped letting drama affect me. I turned off the outside noise and focused on myself.

I could finally say that I felt I was getting back on track, becoming who I once was. A profound feeling of happiness was all I felt. I opened myself back up, let people know my struggles and dealt with them instead of running away.

For a brief period of time, I simply just gave up on life, I hit the bottom, or so it felt– from losing friends and family to struggling with accepting who I was. I let all of the negatives in my life build up and the effect it had over me was catastrophic. Through time, I was able to find an end to the madness of it all. More importantly, I was actually trying to live life again and not give up.

It was all the wrong in my life that I focused on, pushing out the positivity, that made life seem pointless. I led myself down a path to just give up on life. Thankfully I stopped myself from continuing, got out of my trance and saw life in a new perspective.