Thoughts, actions, decisions, successes, and failures are all utilized to help us navigate through our developing lives. Until high school, you have only just begun to mature. Education, social awareness, and life skills seem to constantly update on a daily basis. However, when you reach this higher level of education, learning becomes increasingly harder, friendships are built up and torn down, and you find yourself approaching a level of independence different from that of your childhood. With all of this in mind, it’s hard to imagine not being affected by these drastic changes. 

While the time you spend in high school might be the best four years of your life (although you shouldn’t worry if it’s not), it’s bound to be difficult. You will find that with the larger student population, you will have the opportunity to meet many new people. Some of these people will like you, and some of them will not. And when you’re forced to spend every day together, conflict and bullying can often result. If you ever come across someone that is hurting your emotions, you must remember that you can be—that you are—better than them. Someone can only impact you if you let them impact you. If someone makes fun of what you are wearing, disregard the comment and be proud that you wanted to wear it. If someone tells you that you are fat, ugly, or annoying, just walk away. You don’t need to sit around and let someone say something bad about you. If they see that they are hurting you, it’s a win in their book. You need to be the stronger one. Laugh it off! Smile! Make it seem like they have no significance in your life and, more importantly, prove them wrong—prove that they can’t hurt you and they don’t matter to you. In the end, they really don’t, and you’ll come to realize this more and more with time. The only person that can affect you and your emotions is someone you know better than anyone else: yourself. 

Along with social friction, you’ll find the amount of work that you receive in high school comes in large portions from time to time. It is very easy to let your emotions get the best of you and let it stress you out. But what you need to remember is that at some point, you’ll be done. You’ll finish that final test, hand in that difficult project, turn in that lengthy essay—it will all get done. And understanding that will allow you to come to terms with your emotions and realize that there is no need to stress. It’s high school. It’s not supposed to be easy, but it is supposed to teach you how to develop the right skills to mature properly. 

The importance of all of this—whether this is all you think about, or if you are one of the few who never thinks about any of this at all—is that in the end, we are all the same. We are all humans. We all make mistakes. We all want to succeed, but we all fail at least sometimes. We might try so hard to get that “A” in a class, and then find ourselves struggling to maintain a “C+”. At the end of the day, no matter what happens, good or bad, you are not a failure. If you work as hard as you know you can, then the grade doesn’t matter. It’s the effort that you put in to finish the assignment, and the work you put in, to make sure it represents your full potential. Because that’s what you have—tons of potential to succeed.