Letter to Future Self: The difficult path ahead

August 27, 2018 — by Jeffrey Xu
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Junior recounts the pressures and perks of junior year.

 
Dear future me, 
 
You probably think you don’t have time to read this, seeing that you’re in the brunt of junior year. But please, just give it a couple minutes. I promise it’ll be worth the while. 
I wish I could take a glimpse into your life — right now I have no idea what the future holds, so I’m hoping you can see it from where you are.
But just to remind you of where I am at the moment, I am currently adjusting to the heavy workload of AP U.S. History (APUSH) and English 11 Honors. Homework for those two classes has been taking a combined total of five or more hours each day to complete, despite the new reduced APUSH curriculum. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that I am taking both AP Chemistry and AP Physics, my humanities classes seem to take much more time than anything else. 
In English currently, I just finished the Socratic Seminar work for “The Crucible,” a book that was assigned for summer reading for the first time. The play was enjoyable and didn’t take much time to read, so no complaints there. But I hope you’re getting more efficient at preparing for Socratic Seminars because that first one took me seven hours. 
It especially sucks right now because these long nights of homework are really cutting into my beauty sleep time.
On that note, I hope that you’re sleeping well. It probably seems like it was forever ago that you could get a comfortable nine hours of sleep a night. By now, you’re probably lucky to fit in seven — I’m just having a hard time grasping the concept of being sleep-deprived all the time, unlike the other 90 percent of this school. But perhaps you’ve found a loophole, such as drinking coffee, despite Dad’s constant objections against it.
But, I just wanted to let you know that the end is near. Even this early, there is light at the end of this seemingly endless tunnel called junior year. I’m here to give you that final push, the energy to sprint down the home stretch and cross that finish line.
Just kidding. We both know that the end of junior year is simply the beginning of college apps, intensive summer programs and a long list of college tours. And after that, we have senior year. By the end of first semester, you will, without a doubt, be sliding into severe senioritis. 
There will only be a brief break before we dive deep into college, which is essentially another four years of pain and agony. 
That said, I strongly advise you to keep your spirits up and tackle life with a positive attitude. I know you are probably very stressed, but as they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! 
As long as you’re still keeping the promises you made at the beginning of the year, you should be fine. That is, don’t procrastinate, keep making those to-do lists in Momentum™ and stop — and I mean it — stop watching so much YouTube. 
I’ve found that following these three guidelines has really helped my productivity, especially in pushing through my massive amount of homework these first few days of school. Despite having time for almost nothing else besides schoolwork, I feel like I’ve still been really efficient recently, which is why I really hope you’re still maintaining good discipline. 
Speaking of promises, if I’m being really honest, I’ve already forgotten my New Year’s resolution; in fact, I’m not sure I even made one in the first place. But I do hope you’ve made a strong one for 2019 that will carry you through college apps and first semester senior year. Maybe writing that down somewhere will help.  
With that, I should probably go to sleep now. I have to savor these blissful nights of 9-hour-sleep while I still can. I’ll need all of the brain recovering I can get for my next 5-hour load of junior homework tomorrow! I wish you good luck in your future pursuits, and I hope the path ahead is a lot clearer than it is now. 
With love, 
Jeffrey
 
 
 
 
 
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