The stress is worth it!

Let’s be honest: High School is not all it’s cracked up to be. Friends and family have preached for years “Just wait until you get to high school! It will be the time of your life!” In retrospect, it very well may be. But, there will come a day when you have three essays due, a test to study for and a best friend who is going through a break-up and needs comforting, and you realize High School is nothing you imagined it to be. There will be countless papers to do, books to read, drama to ignore and tears that will roll down your face. It will seem impossible to keep up, to be smarter, faster, or better.

But, what you have to remember through it all is who you want to be once you cross the finish line. Do you want to attend Harvard, and get your masters in psychology? Do you want to go to California to attend an art school? Or, perhaps you have dreams of saving lives as a surgeon. No matter what path you want to take, you have to remember it, and be inspired by it. Yes, the path will be tedious and exhausting, but imagine the reward, that moment when you realize it was all worth it, and use that feeling to fight longer, read more, and search harder, because you

will become everything you dreamed.

As summer starts, you may by overjoyed to have the weight of school lifted. For two months your biggest concern will be whether to go to the pool or the beach.

But, looking back, will you honestly be able to say you've done the best you could? Will you be able to become that psychiatrist, or artist, or surgeon? High School will go by in the blink of an eye, whether or not you want it to, or think it will! What is important is not only to make it through, but to become a graduate with as few possible regrets about friends, grades, and the use of your high school experience in general. So, as you sit by your pools this summer, with not a care in the world, think about the school years' past and what you will do next year to be able to declare "I have given my all!"