LOSING MY PAST TO ACHIEVE MY FUTURE.

BENJAMIN CARRILLO // EDITOR IN CHIEF

I,Benjamin Carrillo, am a man who can’t breathe at the thought of hurting someone’s feelings. I shrivel up at the thought of someone disliking me. I would rather sleep on a bed of nails than allow someone who I don’t know to understand how I’m truly feeling. But I have dreams. I have dreams that can’t be hindered any longer because of any issues in my past that have caused me to have anxious woes in my present. With the first quarter of my senior year already wrapping up recently, it’s time to confront my past head on, and with a heavy heart start to look toward the future.

For me, there was no point where it all went wrong that I could blame my feelings on. It was just anxiousness that appeared one day, a pit in my stomach started eating at me. But it’s not as if that makes my experiences any less valid – and the important part is I start to head towards a world where I can lose that pit of anxiousness, and not let it consume me as it normally does. I’m subjected to sleepless nights – ridden by anxious thoughts about the future. I have found myself on the losing end of a battle with my mental health – a battle that necessitated overcoming for the sake of my future. There’s no point dwelling in the past when the present and future are bright.

Of course, this was easier said than done. It’s irrefutable that colleges are more competitive to get into now more than ever, the future is something taken so seriously by nearly everyone. My peers and I are constantly put at odds with one another, for the prospect of future goals that we deem important enough to be worth our time. Just to get in this magazine, I needed to stand out more than 20 of my peers. The chains of my past need to be cut to get more efficient at this. Goodbye to the sleepless nights, the consuming wave of anxiety, and the depressed thoughts.