Elissa J., Kettering Fairmont High School
Perfection
When you’re a teenager you are constantly bombarded with questions. Where do you want to go to college? What do you want to be when you grow up? What are your beliefs? What are your goals? And so far, all of my answers have been I don’t know. All I know is that I love the stars and the rain. That I create imaginary worlds and write them down in hopes that one day they will become something more. That I dance to escape the hardships in my life. And that I want to help change the world.
I often find that when I set goals for myself, they are unreachable. I struggle with accepting the fact that mistakes are a part of being human and that perfection is just one big hoax. No one is perfect at anything, the word was not created to describe humans at all. It was created to describe sunsets, the temperature, and timing. So in honor of this essay I have assigned myself a goal; find myself. Because if you think about it, that is every teenager’s goal and I have yet to achieve it.
Mental health is the biggest setback in every teenager’s journey to self discovery. When it’s bad, you get stuck in a repeating cycle of misery, where you're just trying to make it another day. You don’t want to ask for help because you were taught to solve your own problems by the age of nine. So you stay quiet. You go through every day exactly like the last. Growing numb. Your once perfectly sharpened pencil, now so dull you hear the wood’s screams as it scratches against the paper, no longer protected by its soft lead. And you realize your silence is the cause of your continuous pain, that maybe you can’t fix this on your own. So you speak up, and maybe they won't listen, but what if they do? Suddenly, you're not alone anymore, your once dull pencil now sharpening one crank at a time. There are still bad days, there always will be, but you’re laughing again and it’s real. You’re not there yet, but you’re back on route to finding yourself.
I have struggled with mental health pretty much since the day I became a teenager. There have been ups and downs and right now I am doing really well, so it is the perfect time for me to begin my own journey of self discovery. I am going to start doing the things that make me happy, get closer with the friends that make me laugh, and push myself to overstep my comfort boundaries. These things I will do for myself, not to impress anyone, or to win anything, because that’s not what finding yourself is about. It’s about doing the things you love to do and surrounding yourself with people who bring you joy. Come to think of it, why would I even want to be perfect when I could be me?
