A Day in the Life of Grace

BEEP BEEP BEEP sounds my alarm clock at 6am as it's intent is to wake me up for the long, dreadful day ahead. Yet I tend to snooze it a number of times and not get up until 5 minutes before heading out the door. This could possibly be due to my 5 hours of sleep the night before in benefit of the one and only, school. Walking through the front entrance of high school is like walking into a prison cell full of people who care about nothing but themselves. Although I can't sit here and make fun of those people because I am one of those people. As I shove kids in the smelly hallway in attempt to maneuver to class, I think to myself "these kids just don't understand." School is an anxious and very overwhelming environment for myself as I am constantly worried about being perfect. Getting a perfect score on my english paper, a perfect score on my math test, and maintaining an almost perfect GPA. Class by class, my anxiety tends to somehow build even higher as pointless tasks are constantly being added to my agenda. A feeling of disgust overcomes my body knowing that after dance tonight I will be up until the witching hour doing homework in attempt to uphold perfection. When doing homework at night the clock seems to act as a race car, but in school one minute seems to last nearly an hour. Somehow, the day full of panic attacks and chaos comes to end when my favorite combination of numbers appear on the clock, 2:10. Racing into my house and plopping down right where I began my morning lets out a sigh of relief. Although I have to get up again because from 4-9 most nights I do what I love most, dance. Being a competitive dancer, I live within the studio for a solid 20 hours a week as it serves as an outlet for me. It allows me to focus on something other than how nasty school is. All of a sudden, the clock strikes 9 and I am back home covered in a pile of work I've dreaded to finish. One of these nights, I had to read a speech for english called "This Is Water". It was my last thing to check off in my agenda which would mean I could go to sleep once I finished. The speech talked about how we as people tend to view our day to day lives in a very negative and self-centered type of way. It acts as our "default-setting" and in order to change that setting, we need to change the way we take in our daily circumstances. "Freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people" (Wallace 237). I was immediately taken aback. I'm most likely not the only person that feels continuously exhausted and stressed about school. Everyone in that prison feels overcompensated with schoolwork and after-school activities resulting in anxiety. As I shoved through that hallway thinking about how they don't understand, they do. Being open to this mindset changed how I will approach my days, will it change yours?