My Perspective

Perspective changes everything. When there's nothing happening in our lives, nothing truly significant, we get hopelessly lost in our own little worlds. When trivial problems that do occur, they appear as giants, blocking the sun and any hope of survival. For the past few months, my world has been college, its homework, exams, essays, or other similar things. Honestly, I can't even count the number of times I've literally cried over being too busy, having a paper due, or not being prepared for a test.

But these things are nothing. They're drops in an ocean of the real world, and I embarrass myself admitting that they scare me sometimes.

When I was in high school, during my sophomore year I took Algebra II. Algebra II is the first hard math that you take in high school, and I found it to be impossible to succeed. One day my teacher took away my test after I had run out of time and I was dumbfounded. How could anyone be so mean? On the way home on the bus I cried on the bus because I had faced something that I wasn't good at. Like a toddler who had lost a game.

Later that week, my biology lab partner Michael died in a car accident on the icy roads of Michigan not a mile from my home. He was 16. His family would never see him again, and here I had been, crying about a math grade that nobody would ever see or care about. Michael wasn't exactly a friend of mine, but after attending his visitation, seeing the face of youth in a coffin, it changed me. Now I knew what loss really looked like.

Recently, I've come to realize this again, how unimportant my "problems" with school really are. There are much more important things, and it's my wish to be continuously mindful of those.