Freshman year. That is so weird to say. Freshman year is a whole new beginning for everyone. It certainly is for me. My philosophy is something along the lines of  “Don’t lose yourself trying to be everything to everyone.” But that is really hard. One struggle of being a freshman in high school is figuring out our social standings. I know most girls try to fit in and impress the boys and upperclassmen, when they should be trying to impress themselves. Our social status is so important to us because everyone wants to be liked. So we often find ourselves not recognizing ourselves because we have kind of molded ourselves to fit into the environment around us instead of being ourselves.

“Breathe. It’s just a bad day, not a bad life.” The struggle of feelings. Depression and anxiety are some of the most common struggles of adolescents. A couple months after school started, I began to feel the deepest parts of my depression. None of my friends knew I was struggling because I was so good at being ok when I needed to be. Most kids are. Most kids are embarrassed of their negative feelings. They don’t want their friends to pity them or think of them differently. When you pass a student in the hallway there is almost no way to tell if they have anxiety or depression. Nobody’s lives are perfect. We think our peers have a wonderful family filled with all the love in the world and have everything they could possibly need. Navigating being a teenager while starting high school is so tough. Then you want to pile on anxiety and depression, as well as countless other feelings. That’s tough.

Sleep. Freshman dont get a lot of it, even high school students in general. I guarantee you that at the beginning of the school year every freshman out there made up a routine that they planned to follow everyday for the whole school year. I promise you that at least 80 percent of those kids have not practiced that routine since the first week of school. It is so hard to go from getting up at seven in the morning for middle school to five in the morning to make sure we get to school on time. That being said, we are all guilty of staying up on our phones or watching that ‘’one more episode’’ of that one show, myself included. Walking into school in the morning is like walking into a room full of zombies. 

Trying to keep up with extracurriculars, family life, social life, and school work is hard. Anything that you do in life will come with its own struggles and they aren’t the same for everyone. These are some of the many struggles that freshman high school students face everyday. Knowing that these struggles are common is a huge relief. Just knowing that everything that you are going through is normal can help students understand their struggles and work towards managing them.