My 32Q For My Sophomore POL
As sophomore comes to a close, I sit here clacking away at my laptop with freezing fingers reflecting on how I have gone through both ups and downs this semester. How has being a sophomore at AHS changed me? What have I done or who have I become to celebrate? What are some of the areas of growth that I need to focus on to improve myself? I suppose that it’s all tied in with my life as a whole.
In the beginning of my second semester of freshman year, I tried smoking cannabis; in the beginning of my first semester of sophomore year, I was caught smoking cannabis. If it wasn’t for my teacher Shane Nelson who found me and five other students taking cannabis wax dabs in a tent I would still be smoking pot to this day. Getting caught smoking weed on the sophomore camping trip pushed me to stop abusing the drug. The humiliation of wanting to be high so bad as to risk smoking on a school camping trip and getting caught was enough to make me want to help myself. Ever since then, I’ve passed my October, November and December drug test; and I plan on passing my January one as well. I now reflect on just how much pot I was smoking before the ordeal, and how much better I feel now that the clouds of marijuana is out of my life. I would not be nearly as responsible and accountable if I did not have to stand in front of my peers and teachers explaining as to why I ever thought it was okay to do drugs at school and in general.
On January 10th, 2015 I was Diagnosed with type one diabetes. This meant that I would no longer be allowed to join the United States Air Force. No matter how clean my record was, how good my high school grades were, no matter how worthy I was, I would not be able to join. It was my lifelong dream that was destroyed by a disease that would last until my final breath. I was so angry with the world for allowing this to happen to me, so I turned to marijuana to cope. It didn’t make me forget about my problems, but instead made me care less about them. I was put into a pit of depression and began to doubt that I was worth being alive. When the sophomore camping trip occured, I was forced to quit my bad behavior. I was so angry the following weeks and nothing made me feel happy like it used to. I was assigned a therapist to help me cope with my problems healthily, and each week I’m alive I feel myself getting better. If I had not been forced to stop smoking, I would still be in that hole of sadness and hopelessness I was stuck in for two years. I’m still in that hole, but I’m doing my best to climb out of it; something pot was only stopping me from doing.
I’ve found that the more time one spends loving others the less time they spend dwelling on how much they hate themselves. Coming into sophomore year, I had no friends in my classes and felt that I was going to be an outcast in my pod. As I began showing people how to love themselves in and out of school distracted me from the looming hatred I had for myself. For example, one particular student in my core classes has repeatedly been neglected from the class. This student does not deserve this treatment whatsoever, and though I don’t feel obligated to him, I want to be his friend, I want to show him that he is worthy of acceptance and friendship by giving him mine. As I have been doing this with my peers, showing them compassion from me (who was once a stranger to them) fills my body with enough compassion to refrain myself from hating who I am, even if it can’t simply make it leave. There is this group of lovely people who have so much compassion for me that it radiates from them to me and from me to them when we speak to one another. One of them, Raimy Sporl, has been with me since I was learning how to walk rather than crawl. As we’ve grown up together, she’s taught me how to cherish the warm colors of life and take lessons from the cold. She’s shown me how to dance with the willow tree and mourn with the rain. She’s taught me how to be a honeybee in a field of thorns. With the compassion she’s shown me I’ve been allowed to draw out the sweet nectar of my peers and teach them love, so I won’t feel my own hate.
Just because the compassion I have for others keeps me from focusing on my hatred for myself doesn’t mean it’s necessarily not there. I have so much hatred for who I am. Every night, whether I’m in the shower or in bed, I tell myself I’m going to change how I behave so I can stop being so emotional about everything. When I’m in school, I forget that I want to change and humiliate myself left and right with my actions. I feel hopeless in ever becoming who I want to be, and I don’t feel deserving of the love and affection that I am given. I don’t deserve to be sad but I am somehow. There are so many good reasons that people should be sad about, none of which I have. This causes me to hate myself in a process much like a vicious cycle; I’m sad about myself and my life, but I shouldn’t be because I don’t deserve to be, thus I hate myself even more. I want to change into someone deserving of love and to love themselves, but I know I can’t and will never be able to. That’s why I want to work on accepting who I am, how to go about that however, I’m not sure.
This is one of the less personal topics I can choose to write about, but one of my areas for growth is that I am a horrible, awful procrastinator. My work is nearly always done last minute and full of mistakes. I want to be able to turn in beautiful work but when it comes to actually doing it I’m only motivated with minutes until the due date. Some people say that’s just how my mind is wired, but when there’s only one hour until our final biology project is due and that’s when I choose to do it, it seems like a much bigger problem. I’ve began to ask my peers to hold me accountable for my work as a solution. It seems to be working, but as the semester comes to a close I feel even less enabled to do my work than I did before. I plan on asking my parents to hold me accountable next semester, and until I see that this fails as well it's my solution.
My question to ponder;
What does it mean to love yourself?