This piece is dedicated to this columnist’s mother, Agnes Elizarde.
If you asked me how my junior year of high school went, I would probably tell you terribly. Actually, I would’ve said something along the lines of, “It was the single worst year of my life.” Keep in mind that right before middle school graduation I developed some weird case of acne-like hives on my face that would have scared a group of zombies back into their graves.
In sum, it was a fairly traumatic time.
That year, I decided it was alright for me to take up every activity available in Juneau while also taking a string of honors academic courses and creating a school newspaper. I’ll lay it out for you: Academic Decathlon, Debate, Teen Council, Yearbook, InterAct Club, the Juneau-Douglas High School J-Bird, Lead On! For Peace and Equality, the JDHS Swim Team, Youth Court, Teen Health Center Advisory Board and … I think you get the idea.
Unfortunately, I did not get the idea. Or, more accurately, I did get the idea but I didn’t want to do anything about it. I was a junior in high school looking at colleges that were soon going to discover all of my inadequacies — that is, unless I found a way to hide them. Plus, as a Filipino-American woman who has been told time again by society that her color meant unworthiness and her gender meant “stay quiet,” I became the underdog who felt the need to “beat the statistic.” My need to become the pinnacle of perfection was already a pre-told fate.
So yes, I pushed myself hard, and for a while, it worked out. Then, it didn’t. Of course, stopping meant failure, and failure was evidence that I didn’t matter to the world — to colleges, to my community, to anyone.
At first, the struggle came in bursts. I had a few panic attacks and crying fits, one of which ended with me quitting the swim team a week before the Regional Championship. Late November is when my stress became a constant. I was almost never on-time for French class, a study that was usually the highlight of my day. I stopped eating during meal times and on several occasions almost passed out from self-guided hunger. I stayed up until 3 a.m. most nights but spent most of that time crying. My anxiety, once dormant, returned to eat away my already diminished existence. Once winter break came, I was exhausted, but not relieved. All of the work I took on was still unfinished and my fear of failure did not permit me a break.
Beforehand, my family had planned a trip to Hawaii for the week. Before everything happened, I was incredibly excited. However, as the week we were to leave came closer, I felt only a need to scream. Or back out. The night before we were to leave, I called my mom and declared that I wasn’t going to go to Hawaii anymore. “Too much work to do” was my excuse, but it was not a good enough one for my mom. When she arrived home and I was still caged in fear and stress, she shook my jail bars until I finally peered through the gaps in my reasoning. She told me what I knew already, but could not face alone: I was tired of doing the things I felt I had no reason to do anymore. I needed a break. She reminded me that this trip would revitalize me, and besides, plane tickets to Hawaii were not cheap. Together, we set a plan for when I returned to Juneau, removing activity after activity on my list until I was down to the things I loved most — or felt obligated to do. I got a full hour of sleep before our flight, but my work was finished on-time. A full day of travel later, I was stuck in Hawaii, land of sunshine and pineapples and ukuleles.
Maybe it was being in the presence of the sun for a week or maybe it was not being allowed to think about all the things I had to do, but I truly felt at ease while staying in our extremely overpriced hotel in Honolulu. It’s safe to say I completely bought into the whole Hawaii thing. Sitting on the beach, wading in the water, watching the sunset, being completely isolated from my life back home — I just didn’t feel as terrible anymore.
One day, my mom, brother and I hopped into our rental car and drove up to the North Shore of Oahu. While on the search for surfers and shrimp trucks we encountered a ukulele shop, small and relaxed like the rest of the Haleiwa.
I’ll cut it short. For the rest of the trip, my mantra was: “Did I just spend $150 on a ukulele?” The answer to that question is yes, I most definitely did. First, because ukuleles are awesome. Second, because when was I ever going to get the chance to buy a ukulele while in Hawaii? (I was not aware of how touristy my logic was at the time.) Third, because I had been wanting to learn how to play the ukulele since I was in the 5th grade and first heard the instrument’s jubilant chords.
Now what does that have to do with all of the horrifying things I was talking about before? Well, everything. I had many goals in my life which I deemed unachievable unless I impressed the right colleges and the right people. Everyday, I would wake up in “fight mode,” ready to brawl against a world of more privileged competitors to do the one thing most important to me — to show the rest of the world that the underdog could run with the rest of the pack, too. In effect, I stuffed my life with things until I was sprinting just to stay alive.
The moment I bought the ukulele, I wasn’t just investing in a lifetime of my mediocre strumming. I was making a testament to myself to put me first, not my pointless need to impress. Even after my mom and I had cleared my schedule of miscellaneous activities I was struggling to keep up with, it was still hard to find love for the things I had left. The ukulele, however, was already a passion. For the first time that school year, I made a decision in support of what I wanted, devoid of outside societal pressure. Before, whenever I thought about the huge ball of activities that were threatening to roll me over, I only intended to run faster. This time, I was thinking: well, why am I even running?
I’m not going to lie. I didn’t come back to Juneau an amazing ukulele player or anything. In fact, I am pretty terrible at the ukulele. Yes, I play one of the easiest instruments in the world and sometimes I still struggle to strum “Over the Rainbow.” Yet, I don’t care. It is months later from the event and I still pick up my ukulele whenever I feel stressed, happy, relaxed or just when I want to play. I play for me, not so I can add it to my list of achievements or to tout it as evidence that I am not actually a failure in life (which, by the way, I am not). So yes, junior year was the worst, but hey, I did learn a lesson and get a ukulele out of it.
On a completely related note, I now make decisions in my life based on what I love and what I want to do with my life, not on what a college wants out of me. Results of my new lifestyle include writing a column for the Juneau Empire, discovering my passion for social change and politics, unrelentless happiness and loving my life more and more everyday.
• Tasha Elizarde is a high school senior living in Juneau. Her column comes out the third Sunday of every month. She also writes “This Day in Juneau History” for the Juneau Empire.
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