I saw my middle school friends who were behaving responsibly and decided I could do that as well. I had severe anxiety and reacted badly to some traumatic experiences I had as a child that led to me acting out as a pre teen. My acting out was mostly avoidance-based, meaning I’d skip school to avoid dealing with teachers and other students, lock myself in my room to avoid eating dinner with my family, etc. I still had anxiety but I ended up redirecting all that nervous energy into being hyper responsible. So suddenly I was confronting everything that made me anxious head on and I was getting all of my work done and actually going to school. Turns out, I’m pretty good at that. Ended up with a 4.0 unweighted and 5.0 weighted GPA in high school and got a full ride into the Ivy my parents already dreamed about. I became really good at masking social anxiety, became “comfortable” with public speaking, made lots of friends, and took on lots of leadership roles.

But there I learned that simply redirecting my anxiety wasn’t a long term solution because as my anxiety became worse due to new traumatic experiences, my hyper responsibility and OCD became unbearable and my personal relationships and my happiness suffered. I remember being absolutely miserable and fantasizing about running away to another country and changing my name. In the end I managed to graduate with honors and was still on Dean’s list during those awful years. Basically I stayed the path that was expected of me. Blah blah blah. Eventually went into research instead of medicine and did well burned out. I ended up taking time off to completely break down my aspirations and evaluate what was truly important to me.

I learned that success doesn’t just mean academic or career but also for my mental health and interpersonal relationships. I wanted true fulfillment from my career instead of just masking everything and trying to live off of the prestige and pride of having a certain career. I kind of went off on a tangent but I just wanted to point out that my change was drastic as a teenager and made a lot of people proud and I was seen as successful but it still was quite artificial and I ended up needing to do a lot more soul searching...