The Most Important Thing I’d Tell My High School Self
The sky isn’t falling.
It’s 10 P.M. and you have yet to start an essay due tomorrow and the bibliography alone is supposed to be three pages and, it’s true, it doesn’t seem like the guy you’ve been flirting with all semester IS into you, after all, and you still have to get the weekly newspaper out with zero typos and everyone, it seems, has started hearing from colleges but you and it turns out you already ate the chocolate chip cookie you saved from lunch.
I repeat: the sky isn’t falling.
I’ve always been Type-A, which, as a I learned recently, was a phrase coined to describe the type of people who are prone to stress, and therefore, heart disease. Ever since I was first given responsibilities—homework, applications, sports competitions, roles in plays—I have been dealing with feelings of stress and anxiety. In seventh grade, I was the star of a play and had a panic attack—legit “I can’t breathe, huffing in a paper bag” kind of attack—before my first performance. I like to think it resulted in an extra-dramatic pause before my grand entrance. That same year, I threw up before a track meet.
The sky wasn’t falling.
The problem was partly that I had no sense of scale. Everything I did seemed terribly important, seemed like my entire future—as a student, actress, athlete, human—were riding upon my performance in that one event. It seemed like I was a fraud and every big high-stress, high-anxiety moment simply provided another chance for The World to reveal me as such. A poser, a faker, not smart, not fast, not a good actress. I had never heard of imposter syndrome, the phenomenon of high-achieving women who feel unqualified to do the thing at which, in the eyes of the world, they’ve already proven themselves to be competent. But I was experiencing it as early as middle school.
The sky isn’t falling.
I’m speaking as if this problem were in the past, of the past, but it isn’t. I still struggle to remind myself that every hiccough, every failure isn’t a reflection of who am I or of everything I’ve been working toward. I still have to remind myself that most of these things don’t really matter “in the grand scheme.” It’s trite to say but it’s true. What matters is love and family and doing what you love and feeling fulfilled. What matters is not what the people watching think of what you’re doing. What you think is what matters.
The sky isn’t falling.
In the Chicken Little folk tale, Henny Penny runs around screaming, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” after an acorn falls on her head. It’s just an acorn. The phrase is now an idiom that’s used to describe the mistaken belief that disaster is just around the corner. It isn’t. Or maybe it is. You can’t know. But the sky certainly isn’t falling, and it won’t.
Are you remembering to breathe?
