Throughout my whole life I have always been a perfectionist. Everything I do has to be perfect even down to the tiniest detail. This has caused me to spend more than five hours on a project, taking the whole day to get the measurements of a cake just right or making sure I have straight A’s. The whole process of trying to achieve the unachievable was so exhausting and time consuming. One day my body could not keep up with the perfect work my brain desired. That is when the whole world I made for myself feel apart.

            My middle school years were very difficult. In sixth grade, I found out that I have anxiety which explained why I was always overwhelmed. A few years later, in eighth grade, I started being very upset and sleepy. As a result, I was diagnosis with depression. The whole rest of the year was filled with many ups and downs. On the last day of middle school, I was excited that next year I would be able to have a new start. But over the summer I started having negative thoughts about high school. I would tell myself that if I could not handle middle school, I would never be able to survive high school. I later realized that because I was so hard on myself, I made myself believe that I could not get through high school.

           The first two months of school were good. I was able to keep up with my schoolwork and make some new friends. Slowly the work was getting more and more difficult. Worse of all there was a ton of formal writing. I could never come up with a topic to write about and the moment I did, the bell would ring. I was getting piled with work and I could not keep up. I stopped turning in assignments, which caused me to fall behind in many classes. Then I just gave up, I stopped doing any of the assignments my teachers gave me. I would come home from school and sleep for the rest of the day. At one point I started telling myself that if I was not going to do any schoolwork, then why bother going to school. School became a fear of mine, that I did not want to conquer. The person that I had been before was being taken over by another side of me. One that I was very unfamiliar with and scared of.

           I ended up taking the rest of the year off to get help overcoming my mental illnesses. I also started taking online classes so I could get the ninth-grade credits I needed. Taking that time helped me understand why I could not keep up with my schoolwork, I found out that I have dyslexia. Throughout my elementary and middle school years I found ways to cope with the dyslexia, so my learning disability went unnoticed. Without my difficult freshman year, I would have never known. This experience has helped me learn to see the positive side of every bad situation.