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I wrote this piece a year and a half ago at the end of my junior year. I am happy to say I no longer feel trapped. This is one of first pieces I ever wrote for Medium, and I believe I now have the emotional distance and wisdom to publish it — I wrote this for myself and hopefully now it can help someone else.
Four times a year, I make the same fruitless exhortation to my parents: please don’t look at my grades. Report card day isn’t stressful. I am not embarrassed by my grades. They’re great. I actually couldn’t beat them no matter how hard I tried. So why do I ask my parents to not open the sealed envelope at the end of each quarter? Because I’m scared that future Ben won’t live up to the expectations he just set for himself.
This may be just a ‘me problem,’ and it is possible that I should be taking this to a therapist instead of my parents. But I think this is more than that. In the past three years of my life, I have crafted the identity I thought I wanted. A hard worker who sets goals and gets them done.
I juggle multiple responsibilities that I may have not wanted to juggle in the first place. A crippling fear of dropping those balls keeps me moving. That crippling fear prevents my pursuit of stillness.
In addition to my lack of stillness, I have often found myself sacrificing not only my mental health…
