All of my photos from high school feel like a lie. Well, not entirely, but they certainly don’t tell the whole story. If you look at my social media during that time, I look happy — and I was. I got great grades. I attended most social events, and I was in the stands at every Friday night football game as a clarinet player in my school’s marching band. I was also making life-long friends, many of whom I still keep in touch with more than a decade later. 

So, why do I look back on my adolescence with anything but fondness? 

At the time, I didn’t have a word for the constant panic and worry I felt every day. The unrelenting need to be better and do better. No accomplishment, no grade, no form of praise was ever enough. I felt like I was juggling a million balls in the air, carrying an impossible weight for any 16-year-old to handle, and failure was my biggest fear.

I often wonder how many of my peers felt a similar pressure. At the time, it seemed like I was completely alone in my struggles. I would stay up until past midnight studying for exams and doing extra credit for classes that I was already passing, just because I felt like I needed as close to a perfect grade as humanly possible. I never said no to an extracurricular, for fear that the one I turned down would be the stain on my college application I would never recover from.

Imagine you’re running on a hamster wheel, and you just keep going faster and faster to the point that you feel like you’re so out of breath that your lungs are going to explode, but there’s no way off. There’s no way to stop. That’s how I felt every day for pretty much my entire adolescence.

And still, somehow, I convinced myself I wasn’t doing enough. I would never be doing enough. 

I sought out therapy in adulthood, which gave me a word for everything I was feeling: anxiety. To this day, my anxiety still manifests in many of the same ways. My fear of failure has not gone away, but I’ve learned how to cope. 

First and foremost, I’ve learned how to slow down. Trust me, it is not easy, and I am not perfect. I still have a tendency to bite off much more than I can chew, because I worry that if I don’t, I’ll never be as accomplished as I hope to be. I am very much a work in progress. I probably always will be.

But even just having a word for these feelings makes life so much better. I’m able to identify how my anxiety manifests, which then allows me to get it in check before I spiral out of control and find myself back on that hamster wheel. I wish I could go back and tell my younger self that my brain is playing tricks on me. I am doing more than enough. I am more than enough, whether I do that extra credit assignment or not.