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