I Wish Some Had Told Me…

Most of the advice I’ve been given during my seventeen years has been all but completely forgotten. The morals I live by usually correspond to past experiences, how I reacted to them, and the lessons that I learned from them. To be honest, I haven’t really had a wide variety of what would be considered wise things said to me. Maybe it’s because I’m still so young. But the one piece of advice that I am sure will stick with me for the rest of my life was something my mother told me. I was under a lot of stress from school, among other things, and when she realized this she simply said, “Do what you have to do - it’ll all turn out somehow.” At first it seemed to me to be such an obvious and simple statement. But the more I think about it, the more meaning it has. When something is important to me, I just have to do what I can to make something happen. But I also have to remember that no matter what I do, there will always be an end result; it’ll turn it somehow. Knowing that there will eventually be an end to certain challenges is comforting. Even if the result ends up being slightly undesirable, I have to put it behind me and just keep on trucking.

At the beginning of my junior year I attempted to expand my horizons a bit. I decided to take an Honors Pre-Calculus course even though I took Level One math for the previous two years and my sophomore year teacher recommended me for Level One. I thought, “Hey, if I just put a decent amount of work into it, chances are I’ll do just fine.” Oh boy was I wrong. From the get-go I started falling behind. The vast majority of my fellow students were completely adjusted to fast-paced mathematics from their previous year, and even some of them had trouble with the completely foreign math known as Trigonometry that was being introduced to us. This was a form of abstract math that was completely unknown to me and I quickly realized that I chose the wrong year to move up a level. I was just barely passing when I thought of what my mother told me: “Do what you have to do - it’ll all turn out somehow.” What I had to do was drop back down to Level One. I recognized that I overestimated myself, and I couldn’t drag that flaw throughout the entire year. Even though it would feel like defeat, what I was really doing was saving myself. The week that I strolled into Level One was the week that I started getting A’s and I enjoyed the subject infinitely more (OK, maybe not infinitely more, but a value approaching infinity). I liked the friends I had in the class and I thought Mr. Barretta was a cool a teacher, but my net sum of happiness was going to be greater at an easier level. I did what I had to do. Maybe it wasn’t an optimal outcome, but it was an outcome nonetheless, and I was happy about it.