How did we get here?

High Every Day

I may have existed to myself since I was 6, and I may have started my life when I was 11, but I did not truly start living until I was 14 and in high school. COVID changed me, man. 14 was the age where, at the very least, I stopped being a "child." I had my future to think about now. This was the home stretch. I still did some stupid things when I was 14 (duh), but hey, I had stopped playing Roblox, so I was basically an adult. Looking at my high school properly for the first time was an experience. Even if I had missed the initial "First day of high school" experience (kind of, we did go for ONE day on a hybrid schedule before doing full online. This information is exclusive to those who didn't stop reading after the middle school chapter), I did still get to look around the school before going that summer prior. This place is where life truly begins.

Although I would like to start at my freshman year... I really can't. It's not totally my fault as we were in a pandemic, so there wasn't a lot to do, but freshman year is just so forgettable. As far as friends, I had none. As far as hobbies and aspirations in life, I had coding which I made absolutely 0 progress on in freshman year. As far as classes, I took the required ones to get them out of the way as people had told me to do. 8th and 9th grade were droughts in my life where I wasn't really invested in my real life so much as my online life. COVID had sucked me into the internet and I wasn't very comfortable with the idea of leaving to re-enter the real world, and given that there wasn't much of a requirement to at this point, I chose not to. I guess it's worth noting that I took Audio and Video Production in my freshman year with the hopes of one day working up to being in Student News again (it was a prerequisite). Well, I'm about to finish up my senior year, and I have not once taken Student News. I was still running on my hit I had gotten from 8th grade Student News, I guess. We all make mistakes in the heat of passion. It's much easier to skip 2020 and jump right into 2021, so that's what I'll do. Nobody wants to hear about Biology class!

2021 was the worst year of my life. Straight up, I've said it since the end of that year, and I may say it until I'm buried in the grave. 2021 was the epitome of living for nothing and hating what was surrounding me. I was 14 for a few months before turning 15 (April birthdays are superior to any other month, by the way), and those ages sort of suck in general. In particular, though, the effects of COVID making me chronically online were in full force. My interest in Geometry dash which was my main game from 2019-2020 had faded. I still had no friends. I was basically a hermit that lived life one day to the next, just using Twitter and Discord while caring too much about what internet strangers thought while lying to myself about how much I actually did. I remember summer of 2021 in particular sucked so much. My laptop was broken for that summer for all but 3 days (because my silly self broke it twice). I've never been at such a point in my life where it felt like truly nothing was happening. I can't even tell you what happened that summer because it was just nothing. I remember one night when we were visiting my aunt, I had gotten mad at a bunch of other people my age on Discord. I was playing it off as cool on there, but in real life, I started to think "Man, what the hell am I doing with my life?" A mix of COVID limiting what I could do and my obsession with my online life had left me in this funk. I'd argue that I've never been depressed in my life, but spring-summer of 2021 is about the closest that I've gotten. "Those were the days!", I tell myself knowing fully well that I am still technically in my childhood.

It's weird to summarize 8 months just like that, but I was really just doing nothing. Things did start to pick up an ever-so-slight bit once my sophomore year began. Notably, this was because I joined my school's Esports team to play Minecraft competitively. This was arguably the first significant thing that I did since starting high school which says a lot. I had wanted to join the team since before I even got into high school, but I don't need to repeat what I've been saying about my freshman year. Joining Esports marked the start of phase 3 of childhood. Elementary was my building phase, middle was my creation phase, and, excluding freshman year, High school was my recreational phase. Given that I started high school with less than I had going into middle school, there was a lot of room to make a new me. I will forever be grateful for Esports as it gave me a community, or at least just something in my life, when I had nothing. I took what very little real skill that I had in Minecraft and put my heart into the Esports team. We met 3 times a week, and every time I was happy to be there with my team, ready to practice and compete. For the first time in a long time, I had something which I could attribute to who I truly was.

How did I actually rebuild myself, then? Well, Esports was great, but we were still in the hell of 2021, so things were happening slowly. I started taking Digital Media and coding where the skills I was learning were much more applicable in a real editing program. I met some great people in ELA, who I don't talk to anymore after the class ended, which gave me some type of friendship. In everything, I was at least building purpose. Maybe what kept me away from depressive ideas in freshman year was the fact that I envisioned myself reaching this kind of point. Either way, any slow start may lead to a speeding finish. There was just this different mindset once I was a sophomore, you know? Every small thing I had felt bigger because I was used to living for nothing. With every one of those small things, I craved more of it, and more is what I achieved. 2021 eventually merged itself into 2022, and THAT is when things reached full force.

2022 was the best year of my life. Straight up, I've said it since the end of that year, and I may say it until I'm buried in the grave. 2022 was the epitome of living for everything and loving what was surrounding me. I was 15 for a few months, but then I turned 16, and that's where the fire starts. I had one goal in mind entering 2022: It can't be as bad as last year. I sat in my room on the last day of 2021 thinking about how awful that year was. It was only a few days after my parents had had their last fight before their inevitable divorce, and that really gave me a chance to look at how everything had come crashing down that year. 2022 was THE year to rebuild. Even on the last day of 2021, I had gotten into some pretty heated drama online which was arguably the most heated for me to that day, so I went into 2022 ready to be so much better. I joined a Minecraft Discord that I was fairly comfortable with, looking to improve my skills for Esports. I had a new friend in my good friend Kathi who I had met in December of last year (though we wouldn't start actively talking until March). Life could really only go up from here, and go up it did.

Where do I even start? Like in 2021, the trend was gradual, but things definitely got better. In March, I completed my Driver's Permit course over about 2 weeks and became a permitted driver. Having Kathi as a new close friend was really nice at that same time. I still had quite a bit of my toxicity from 2021, but it was slowly fading away. I finished my sophomore year smoothly and cued the summer of 2022 which directly counteracted the summer of 2021. In spring of that year, I set up a checklist of goals that I had for the summer. That's how determined I was to make this better than the previous summer. I was willing to write out my damn goals if I needed guidelines on what I should be doing. They weren't anything special. They were basic things like become a tier 4 Minecraft PVPer, get all of the strawberries in Celeste, maybe learn a new thing in Python, maybe drive on the highway a bit, expand my music taste, and even things I hadn't cared much about previously like my appearance and learning a second language. Admittedly, I really only accomplished the easier goals on my list, but that wasn't the point. I had a purpose. That summer was so great as I actually was doing things that I wanted to do. I remember talking to Kathi on the last day before school started again, and I told her that I was feeling great about the summer (after I had spent a goof portion of it with her), that I had one motto headed into junior year, and that motto was "Just keepin' the flow." I had a new mindset and a new me. I just had to keep the flow.

Junior year was going to be tough, but I felt unstoppable at this point. It's this weird thing that I do where I just refuse to imagine myself losing. I didn't know quite what would define that year, but in retrospect, I can narrow it down to two things that I think really pushed me: My Twitter account getting suspended (yes, for real) and Speech and Debate. Okay, sure, I was mad about my Twitter suspension at the time, but it might honestly be the best thing that's happened to me. Man, that site is so toxic. I couldn't no-life on there anymore because I wasn't willing to make another account. That may be the only time that my stubbornness has worked in my favor. No more Twitter means that I am forced to appreciate the real world. Speech and Debate, on the other hand, was really something special. I was taking the competitive class, and man, let me tell you, that environment was something else. I won't get into all of the gory details (but I will later!). but just know that when I got home from the first day of junior year, I told Kathi, quote, "I think these are my people. Just being around people who share the same passion for competitive public speaking and debating... I really felt the chemistry in the room. I've just never entered a class and instantly felt comfortable within that class, kinda wack." If Esports was so great, then that makes Speech and Debate a gift from heaven. I enjoyed every day of that class, no exaggeration.

Alongside my summer goals continuing, I just wanted to be more confident and free in junior year. I was done being an introvert. I knew that I wanted to talk to people and have more friends, so I just needed to go out there and do it. It's so freeing to be confident, man. I may have my own insecurities, but I know that I can talk to people and it'll be okay. This steam train just kept going throughout 2022. I looked forward to Speech and Debate every day. We had 3 competitions that semester, 2 of which I went to, and I was living a dream at them. A lot of where I'm at today both socially and internally can be attributed to the start of junior year. The only bad thing that really happened in that time period was 2022 Halloween (where our turnout was terrible). For the first time since that elementary school "popular kid" reign, I felt truly connected with my life, and that was absolute euphoria. 2022 was the year where I finally became who I truly was. I became me.

I will admit that I slowed my roll once 2023 started. Speech and Debate (the competitive class) ended, and the normal class wasn't quite as interesting. However, 2022 allowed me to finally evolve into who I am as a senior today. I would talk about senior year, but the thing is that it's challenging to look at that through a retrospective because I am still witnessing the effects of what has happened this year, and I'm still living in my biases. I would say that I haven't changed much since the start of this year too, so any evolution that has happened this year is likely not yet worth mentioning. One day, in the future, I'll write a little more, and I'll be able to see things clearly, but a goal of mine while writing this was not to make a fool of myself, so please understand.