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March 20, 2019 - Image 11

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The Michigan Daily

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I

went to Stuyvesant High School in
New York City. Stuyvesant was a
part of the eight “specialized high
schools” run by the NYC Department of
Education that “supports the educational
needs of students who excel academically
and/or artistically.” To be admitted, stu-
dents needed to score well on an exam
called the SHSAT (Specialized High School
Admissions Test). Stuyvesant stood at the
top of the nine schools, and my experience
there unfortunately both met and exceed-
ed its grandeur and intimidating image.
The picture I am about to paint in your
mind may seem like fiction, but all I can
say is that I wish it was: Most students
wake up at 6 in the morning to make a
one-hour commute to school, they sleep
about four hours a night, they have about
eight to nine academic classes scheduled
per day, of which about four to five of them
are Advanced Placement or honors classes.
When school ends at 4 in the afternoon,
most students have around one to two
hours of extracurricular activities (which
colleges love), then they get home around
6 or 7 to work on their mountain load of
homework until 2 a.m. Yet, even the seven
to eight hours of studying students do a
night is not enough time to finish all the
work assigned to them.
Of course, students did have the option
to take fewer classes and not participate in
extracurricular activities, but it simply was
not a choice for many. The peer pressure
and cut-throat environment of my high
school severely limited students’ autonomy
over their decisions.
You could only imagine the mental and
physical toll this would have on the stu-
dents. Mental health was a big issue at
Stuyvesant. A year didn’t go by without
hearing about a suicide attempt or students
suffering from depression or anxiety.
Being in this kind of environment fos-
tered a perpetual restlessness inside of me.
There was always something that needed
to be done. It didn’t matter the month,
week, day or hour.
This feeling of being chased by deadlines
didn’t go away even during breaks or the
summer months. There was always sum-
mer homework and the need to prepare for
the next big thing —the SAT, SAT subject
tests, next year’s curriculum and college
essays. I don’t remember if there was ever a
moment when I felt like I didn’t have some-
thing I had to do.
I became used to this kind of constant
pressure and developed a persistent need
to keep myself occupied. This is why I
wrote notes from my biology textbook
on train rides to and from church, why I
brought my design homework to volunteer-
ing events, why I laminated my chemistry
notes and studied them in the shower, why
I read on my bus rides to school, why I read
from small sheets of paper on my bike rides
to school and why I studied while walking

to class.
Sustaining this lifestyle of constantly
doing something developed into my need
for constant stimulation. If I didn’t feel
stimulated by anything, I felt like I was
wasting time. Whenever I was in the show-
er, doing the laundry or washing the dishes,
I felt the need to at least turn on a YouTube
video or listen to music.
Being a child of immigrant parents and
coming from an Asian family with high
expectations also heavily influenced this
type of behavior. My mother always com-
pared me to other students and insisted
that I must keep working no matter what.
She was quite emphatic of this to the point
that whenever I slept, I would be terri-
fied of my mother catching me in the act,
because she always yelled at me when I was
unconscious.
Everything changed when I entered the
University of Michigan as a freshman. The
main difference was that I began to have
so much free time. At first I embraced this
change; after all, who doesn’t like a break?
During my free time, I started to work on
my unfinished novel from middle school,
read books and spent time watching vid-
eos. But, eventually my pervasive habits
from high school began creeping back into
my life.

I started feeling restless again. I was
conditioned to stress, so I wasn’t comfort-
able with any other state of mind. I was
anxious whenever I didn’t have something
to do in the upcoming hour. I felt guilty if I
took an hour of break at the end of the day. I
never did anything unless it had a purpose.
And you may find this the craziest of all:
Whenever I walked into a bathroom stall,
I found it necessary to console myself that I
wasn’t wasting time.
When I stopped to reflect on why I
would not let myself fully adopt the more
relaxed lifestyle I had indulged in at the
beginning of my freshman year, I arrived at
three answers.
First, I feel like I am in a race — one that
will not end until I die. Let me clarify: In
this race, I feel like I am being tested as a
human being. If I do not build up perse-
verance and a tolerance to stressful events
now, I believe in 20 years I will feel inade-
quate as a human being. Of course, the abil-
ity to handle stressful events is not the only
measure of human competence, but it is the
one I find myself emphasizing the most.
Second, it was simply difficult to get rid
of old habits. I kept telling myself, “Life
won’t always be as easy as it is now.” I won’t
always have a few hours to spare and relax
every day. I won’t always have the oppor-

tunity to sleep eight hours a day. I won’t
always be blessed with a light workload.
Hence, by indulging myself right now and
not toughening myself up, I would become
unprepared for life’s misery in the future,
thus dooming myself to failure. These grim
thoughts about the future, led me back to
my first point: Stuyvesant taught me that
what I experienced during high school
would be what the “adult world” was going
to be like. I couldn’t expect anything but a
stressful future, because that was the only
thing that life had given me in the past. And
who can blame me? If the only thing that
life teaches you is suffering, how can you
hope for anything else?
I watched a TV show a couple years ago
about a protagonist who suffered from
child abuse and developed schizophrenia
as a result. The protagonist compared him-
self to a camel. He explained how owners
of camels tie the animals to desert trees
during the night. The next morning, even
when the owners untie their camels, they
don’t run away. The camels remember
their imprisonment to the tree the night
before, so they remain “trapped” there the
next morning — just like how we remem-
ber our past wounds. The pain manifests
into a trauma and our past keeps us forever
chained and imprisoned.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

Wednesday, March 20, 2019 // The Statement
3B

BY CHRISTINE JEGARL, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR
We could all be camels

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