• The events of the high school years are nothing to be significantly proud of. How the expression "the best years of your life" became so widely acknowledged I will never know.

    Those were the years in which you learn who you truly want to be, the ones in which you finally discover your passion. Unfortunately, they are also a time of transition, but no transition is without obstacles.

    If I had to decide the defining moment in my High School experience, I would choose the day I had to deliver my personal monlogue for my drama class. I can never forget the intense heat in my face as i stood on the stage, and i could only imagine how red i must have looked. However, I knew what i had to say, and so i stared at the spotlight and said

    "I had a dream once, where I was shot in the right arm. I woke up crying that day. I had never noticed that that was truly one of my biggest fears. I need my right arm. It’s not because I need it to throw a ball or to write a paper; it’s the one I use when I draw. When I’m drawing, or painting, or sketching, I feel like I’m actually a person. When I draw it doesn’t matter what grade I got on a test, or what college I’m going to. I don’t need to impress people. I feel like I want to drop out of school to be an artist. People don’t believe me when I tell them that. I wish they would stop telling me how much potential I have. They tell me potential opens doors; well I think it’s a prison. I took one test when I was 6 years old, and now my entire life has been dictated for me. Honors, AP, College, Career, and Death.
    I don’t care anymore. I don’t want to do this anymore. One of my friends gave me a set of drawing pencils for Christmas. I have used them four times since. Stop drawing and read your textbook. That isn’t who you are. You have potential. Well guess what? I don’t want to sit on a desk from seven to four, just to go home and spend three more hours trying to find the area between two sine curves. I want to take out my drawing pencils and do a self-portrait. I want to go out and take pictures of the shadows in the sunset. I want to paint until my hands are the colors of my canvas.
    But I’m not going to, because it’s too late. I’ve been living this way so long that so much freedom scares me. I have spent my entire life working for a future that I’ve been told I need to have. I don’t know what I would do on my own, if I followed my own ideas. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I don’t have a life. I just have potential."

    I could feel my throat swelling, not with words, but emotion. I did not cry, but I felt at that moment that I was truly alive, and I looked at my audience and I felt powerful. From that moment on, I decided tat the subject of that fateful monologue would become a distant memory, overshadowed by the future art career that i would follow.

    In High School I figured out that it was me against the world. In High school, I discovered who I was.