When I started high school, everything felt fresher than waking up in the morning.
I had new classes, new classmates, new teachers, and found myself in a big new building.
I even had a new crush.
She was a pretty blonde girl in my study hall, gym class, and lunch. I had never seen her before. I found out we had a mutual friend, and that mutual friend flung us together like it was nothing. We started texting each other awkwardly and I would stop by her lunch table to make even more awkward small talk after buying my daily cookie.
Like most ninth grade relationships, we started dating rather quickly. She met my family when we went out for my birthday. I met her's too. They were probably mortified to see their daughter dating a little scrub with Justin Beiber hair taking their daughter out.
A few weeks later, two days before the homecoming dance, she dumped me in the middle of the hallway after school. It felt like the world was coming to an end. I went home, pushed the mattress off my bed, locked the door to my room, and cried all night while my mother tried her best to help, but there was nothing she could do. The upset was created by my own mind, so, I had to be the one to solve it.
Often, the emotions we feel are the result of the stories we tell ourselves, and the story I had told myself was, "This girl is the only person I care about and I'm going to be with her forever." Essentially, I put "forever" in her hands, and she, well, dropped it. There it was, my forever, shattered into a million pieces on the ground.
I hit a bit of turbulence early in my high school career, and I never quite recovered. The whole plane just took a complete fucking nosedive into the ocean, plunging so far down that only those who took a submarine down to the abyss would ever discover the sunken plane that was me the rest of my four years in high school. In other words, I felt like the invisible kid, much like my friend Dan Lok during high school.
I'm being dramatic, I know, but things did take a turn for the worse. All of a sudden, I had my first outbreak of acne. It was like a mountain range with fiery volcanoes positioned itself on my cheeks. Then, I started sucking at baseball. My grades slipped. I became depressed.
I could have stopped the downward spiral in its tracks and actually enjoy my high school experience if I didn't get so wrapped up in the story I was telling myself. I needed a different perspective, a zoomed out perspective. I was zoomed all the way in. If I just had enough life experience to know that all I need to do was refer to the Buddhist mantra, "What am I experiencing right now?", my entire high school experience could have been different. But, experience doesn't come until after you needed it most. So, my high school experience was garbage.
To clean up the garbage, I used some tools. No, not like the trash pickers you see inmates on the side of a road with. My tools are... let's just say they're a bit different.
Here are the tools I used to get rid of the garbage in my life:
- Read at least 10 pages per day - Become an avid reader. Learning became a refuge in adversity for me, and one of the best ways to learn is to read the lessons taught by those that have been there and done that in whatever I want to get better at. As the great Jim Rohn said, “Don't wish it was easier wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom.” With each page I turned, I was becoming better, building new skills, and gaining more wisdom.
- Listen to a podcast every day -
- Eat clean
- Exercise
- Do nothing
- What am I experiencing right now?
