“O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring,
Of endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, . . .
What good amid these, O me, O life?”
Answer:
“That you are here — That life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” -Walt Whitman

I’ve never given myself the opportunity to be more than what I had always simply been. I stayed just about the same throughout much of my life with minimal knowledge, experience and effort. With that, high school has been transformative to me.
As I had barely spoken to anyone in the years before out of fear once moving to Green, I came into freshman year with one friend who I had only just become friends with the school year before. I was very anxious and scared to experience something that I couldn’t really ask for guidance with as I had started in the year of covid. To add on, I didn’t have anyone in my classes that I was decently acquainted with, leading me to confide and hide in the awkward and shy shell I bent around me with an even stronger force. I had spent most of my free time online meeting and talking to several strangers from all around. Inevitably, I was consumed by the internet. Leaving my school work to rot as missing assignments, turning as many assignments in at the end of each quarter to scrape by with a passing grade in almost all of my classes. With these people I had met and the new friendships I thought I had formed, I was failing and falling behind in almost every aspect of my life. Changing to be less than what I had always thought of myself for those people and their ideas of what I should be.
Without a word, the night before freshman finals I decided to chop off my hip length hair and switch to be the embodiment of who I thought I was supposed to be because of the things I fed into with the internet swallowing my personality and appearance whole.
Sophomore year I came back with a completely different appearance and personality. I performed this person as if in a desperate reach to be someone I would never have been. As the year began I collected more and more attention, both negatively and positively intended. People started talking about me and I slowly gained more friends alongside the friend I went into freshman year with. I became obsessed with the idea of being whoever that person was without a clue that the neglect of love I had for my true self had begun to cause my mental being to whither. I started to act selfishly and even what I’d consider to be cruel all because of the idea that I surrounded myself with, that I had to be that person. My grades were horrible and I began to question my relationship with my parents. During winter break I had blocked my first real friend over ridiculous ideas I was allowing my head to be filled with. After coming back I pretended as if I never even knew her while she did the same with me. Soon, just before starting our second semester, I decided after a rough day that the only way I could get away from everything I surrounded myself with was to swallow a bunch of pills and go to bed in the hopes that I wouldn’t wake up after. As I had no idea what I was doing, it didn’t work. Instead I spent the next 5 days vomiting, eventually getting taken to the hospital to have water pumped back into me as I was incredibly dehydrated. Those 5 days I spent alone in the dark of my room contemplating everything. It was a turning point for all that I had put myself through. A couple months after I apologized to my original friend and regained our relationship while slowly drifting away from all of the new ones I had made that year.
Over the summer I shaved off all of my hair and spent my break alone. I came back with the idea of trying to renew myself by trying to be someone I wasn’t again. I tried to be beyond my mind, to be mature and interesting, putting that pressure back on me as an attempt to not be that person I was before. As my junior year went on I gained a few friends alongside a draining romantic relationship with a girl that practically devoured all there was to me. I fell back into some twisted trap of an unstable mentality. My junior year was essentially silent suffering as I was unaware of how nauseating I had felt from being in that relationship and it continued on like that through the summer.
I came into senior year without a clue in the world how it would turn out. A lot was up in the air as the years before had been full with several errors I had yet to really learn from. At the beginning, everything felt the same, I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. But as I recognised the past, I began to try harder. I began to push for the growth and improvement I yearned for. After months of consideration I broke up with the girl that leached onto my energy. I came to several other enlightenments between that time and when we realized our efforts to stay friends with her was not working out for either of us and eventually we came to the decision to stop talking to each other. After detaching from her as a whole, I felt like I had found my way out of the cage I trapped myself in. I felt like I was me again. Finally I reached that feeling of being alone again. I dedicated every bit of it to improving myself. I chopped my hair again and my adventure felt like it had begun. After mentally and physically isolating myself from my friends and family I began to fill my days with them again. This growth allowed so much of me to improve. All of my relationships, apologizing and creating clarity with the people I have done wrong to in the past years or have done wrong to me, taking care of myself, rediscovering my love for the hobbies I once spent every day doing when I was younger as well as an effort to pursue new hobbies, staying on top of things better than I had before and just overall recreating my environment and mentality and I couldn’t be prouder of myself for the person I have become.
With everything I have learned and experienced over the years, I plan on going into some field of work dealing with psychology in hopes to help people find that light in the darkest places as I have found for myself through my time. To finally try to contribute my verse in the play of life.