birth. Life, I mean, life starts with birth and ends with death. Life is so strange to me, we are born from two people, at least the physical, but where do our souls come from. What makes us, us? Like our personalities, where do they come from, and the scarier question is where do they go?

I’ve often found myself pondering this exact question, dreading the day I find out. A huge pit would fill my stomach every time I thought about it. The world would close in, and I couldn’t breathe. Later on I would find out this was the first of many panic attacks, although I never knew I had them.

See, my parents had a different approach to parenting, you’re fine! What other kids would call depression or anxiety, simply didn’t exist in my life. I had the opposite of self-diagnosing I would suffer through thinking it was normal. Which depression and anxiety is pretty normal in this day and age, but I never called it that I was simply always scared or sad.

Anyways I’m straying too far from the path.

Life, people spend their whole life trying to find meaning, but what if there isn’t one. That’s not very catholic of me. I constantly feel like I’m losing my life, like I should be doing something more.

When you die, everyone says you have 7 minutes of brain activity which is usually spent reliving your life. I don’t want to have 7 minutes of me sitting in my room crying. I want to have memories. Easier said than done. If i’m being honest I don’t think my life will start till I leave school. I’ve been here forever and honestly, I think I need a change of scenery. Don’t get me wrong, its had its moments, but I need more, a lot more.

I want to do something with my life, and make a name for myself. Which is a lot harder than it sounds. I hope I achieve it, but at the bare minimum, I’d like to be happy. I think everyone does.

I think I’ve come to terms with death although I still worry, and it scares me shitless, it’s not that bad. I hope to be one of those old people who climb Mount Everest and do intense hikes when I want. I want to be that old person who says ” i’m ready to go, i’ve lived a beautiful life and i’m ready”. Actually, I hope to perform till the day I die, maybe sprinkle a movie or two in there. One day I want to find myself in a stadium full of people coming to see me, and suddenly falling silent because the crowd is singing my song for me. Millions of voices intertwined into one beautiful melody being sung to me. That’s when I’d know I’m ready.

Thats when I’d call my life complete.

Anyways as usual I’ve gone way over the 150 words, ciao!

Following up on my last blog although I may not be good at sports I sure do have fun with them. Basketball is the sport I’ve played for the longest and probably am the best at out of all my past sports. Basketball season is two weeks away and i couldn’t be more excited. Over the last weekend me and my brother played basketball together for fun and it reminded me if basketball season coming soon. This is the last good season for our team as our two best players are seinors and are graduating. It’s not the sport I enjoy but more the game. Leaving school early, doing my hair in the bus, talking in the locker room before the game. If theres one thing I am it’s a team player, I derive all my joy from the sport from my team. The bonds i have formed and the memories i have created through basketball have lasted. Many people need a form of validation in their lives wether its athletic, acedemic or for some male its something many crave. I myself used to want athletic validation but once I relized i was very bad at sports and started to play for fun I rediscovered my love for the sport. I’m extremely excited for what this year holds for our team.

Searching for a way to manage my relationships, curricula, activities, toilet time, and college apps, I have been bombarded with countless time-management tips: Eisenhower matrix, Pomodoro techniques and a bunch of other [techniques] that take more time to pronounce than actually save.

Oh yeah, you also need to create a to-do list for every single time you [something generic], set a timer for using the bathroom, and wake up at 3:42 am. If you do all those things, you can finally meditate in the morning, stay on track with 6 AP classes, excel at those college essays, watch an hour of TikTok, and read 20 pages of the book, watch an hour of TikTok. And afterwards burn out and die.

Restart.

I hope you first tested this for yourself, reduced your life-span by a couple years from sleep-deprivation and are now open for suggestions.

First, make your bed. Then, clean your room and throw away all the junk. Next, you need to clean your head of all the junk that you are consuming. Human attention is the gold of today’s age. Corporations are creating more innovative and cunning ways to take it away from you. And you are happy to let them do it.

There is a finite amount of time in a day, and instead of giving it away, you need to set your priorities. What really matters to you? Focus on it. Everything else is junk. You should be hungry for your time. You should not want a single minute to go to waste because it will never come back.

Think about all those dreams that you have. All the things you want to do. Do you think you will ever get to them if you watch TikTok or check your messages every five minutes?

To manage the craziness of my senior year, I had to get rid of YouTube, avoid social media, and focus only on things that matter to me: people, education, sports. Make sure that when you close your eyes, you do not regret what you did today. Because the way your day goes, is the way your life will go as well.

Sometimes I like to be humbled. In Ms. Whipple’s AP Lit class, everyone had to go around and read their thesis to the class. In essence, everyone’s thesis was the same thing with slight variations. It’s crazy to me how all 17 or so of us had the same exact thesis. I think different things about everyone in that class.  I view them differently academically, as friends, athletically, yet in the end everyone ended up producing the same exact thing. Despite what I had previously thought about everyone’s writing skills it turned out that no one was actually better than anyone else. In some ways, it felt like one of those crazy things that people say about how the US school system is there to make the kids the same and like robots. At the end Ms. Whipple read her thesis, sharing that she had written it with less than half the time the class was given. I’m telling you that it was literally a work of art. It’s crazy how much better she could be than the entire class. This experience led me to think about how small my scope of the word gets sometimes. The best person at whatever subject or sport or anything here at OVS isn’t even close to being the actual best. It humbled me in a refreshing way. I realized even what I would attribute as some of my best skills or subjects, that I’m not even close to actually being good at them. After Ms.Whipple read just one thesis statement I remembered that I’m just one student in AP Lit who is nothing special, yet it’s in an inspiring way. I’m reminded that if I want to be good at writing, it’s going to take a lot more work. I’m reminded that it’s going to take a lot more work to be good at essentially anything. I realized that compared to other experienced people I’m really bad at most things. It’s astonishing how talented and gifted some people can be. To me, it’s a freeing thought.

Lately, I have just been so done with people. There are so many people in my life currently who just need to be put in their place. Recently, I have had an issue with one of my friends that I have known since I was three. I consider her my sister and we have been there for each other through our lowest lows. A few weeks ago when I went home for the weekend from boarding school, I planned to see my friend that Saturday. We made that plan a month in advance because we barely get to see each other anymore. That Friday, she called me saying that she wasn’t going to be able to hang out because she had unofficial plans to hang out with a group of people. The people she was going to hang out with all hated me so why would she choose to hang out with them instead of me? I told her that it was fine but it was obvious that I was upset about it. A few weeks later, she texted me asking if I was mad at her and I said yes. She dared to ask me why. In the nicest way possible, I told her that I felt like she ditched me. She tried to tell me that I was her priority and started making up excuses. If someone cancels plans with me last minute to hang out with someone else, it’s obvious I’m not their priority. She ended up apologizing but actions speak louder than words and I won’t believe that I’m her priority until she acts like it.

I like to leave my window open when I go to sleep. It makes me excited to wake up in the morning to the air, the sunshine, and all the morning sounds. I like to write in my journal. I like it because it lets me express things that I could never express otherwise. I want everyone to start to appreciate the smaller things in their life more often like the sounds coming through their windows in the mornings and writing in a journal before going to bed. I want us to be more conscious of what’s happening in our environment from the moment we wake up to the sunshine all the way until we write in our journals at night.

PC: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/j1Kg56OC18Bw5IdaLSYZTxpt94uZ7FGCEuT_sDTAtKHCjimJANWqSUpkQ5b6Nygk1VxaovgjrKcL5DbXx5WOvbSSIRfrWzx3bUtlR89M2qvoIoulY5QqA8iMQG434n0hy_yg0eekquUEQ44f8VbXFa0