Hello, my past self. We’ve been through some good times and tough times, but overall, I’m still here, and I’m doing well, so I would like to give you tribute to that. I want to talk to you about speaking up for yourself, even if it’s to your friends or family. In seventh grade, we would have fun, yes, but as we got closer to the end of the year, you felt that the things you were doing with your friends were just corny.
Well, not to just call out your friends back then for being corny, you did enjoy some of those things yourself, but as the school year progressed, you weren’t having as much fun. You felt that you didn’t want to continue to do those things, like play fighting, pretending to be a character on a show, especially when you started to see yourself more and more mature, seeing as you would graduate from middle school just a year later.
You wanted to mature from the stage that you were stuck in with your friends. But you never said anything. No matter how many times you felt like you didn’t want to do something with them or in general, you never spoke up. This left you stuck in a place where you wanted to get out of. You were a people pleaser. You wouldn’t speak your mind on something unless you were mad about something, like if you were arguing, and that left your say on things out of the conversation 80% of the time, outside of the work we did at school.
Moving on to 8th grade, I wanted to change that. If I had something to say, I said it; if the person I said it to didn’t like it, that was their problem. With that mindset, I’ve made some very big decisions. For example, I dropped out of the student council run.
The person in charge of it would keep bringing up my brother’s name on how he did a great job on things as a student council member. Even when I first signed up, the first thing she told me was that my brother was great, so she expected a lot from me. But I was the one there; my brother had already graduated.
Yes, I did procrastinate. Yes, I didn’t try at first. But when it came to the speeches, I wanted to get it done so I would have it ready by the time we needed to present. But one day, the advisor came to talk to me while I was in the hallways, asking if I still wanted to participate because my speech was incomplete, even though I was trying to complete my speech in advisory at that point and hadn’t even put away my things yet.
I felt like she wouldn’t let me explain myself, combined with the times she spoke about my brother. I told her that I would drop out. I didn’t want to try to run for student council with her comparing me to my brother and not letting me explain myself. Now, the message I’m trying to give out isn’t to just drop out of student council elections just because you don’t like the way the advisor talks to you. But to simply speak your mind if you have something to say, say it (in a positive way, of course). Don’t just keep things bottled up all the time; if you’re going to school, you’re doing it to get an education, not to please others. Overall, you shouldn’t just keep thoughts, suggestions, or your general feelings to yourself if it greatly affects you and how people see you; be proud of who you are and express that you are proud. Speak your mind.
To myself in the future, I hope you succeed in achieving our goal of entering the field of engineering. I also hope we hit 6ft eventually. Please continue to follow our advice and speak up for yourself. We wouldn’t want to be doing something we didn’t want to do. Remember to speak to our parents every day so they don’t get mad at us. You hated it when they felt like you didn’t appreciate them if you didn’t call for one day or multiple days.
Remember to take care of our sister, and try not to fight with our brother. Talk to your friends from middle school, and to the friends you’ll make in high school. They’ve been with you through a lot, and your friends in the future will be with you. I’m not sure what will happen to us and the girl we are dating, kind of, but make sure to keep in touch with her as well since we’re going to different schools.
Make sure to give back to your community; they built you up into the person you are now. They’re like your second family, so meet up with the Learn campus you went to, meet up with De La Salle staff even after you graduate, and talk at Morning Meeting for DMSF when you become an alumnus. Make sure to take care of your mental health. There’s surely going to be some ups and downs, twists and turns, but at the end of the day, we have to keep a steadfast mindset and keep pushing.
In high school, just try your best based on what the alumni were talking about. Right now, I know what to expect from the environment and how I might feel when it comes to fitting in. I don’t want you to have to go through a nightmare throughout high school when all we’re there for is to learn and to move closer to pursuing something in the engineering field. I want you to keep in mind that things are going to change. And with that change, might come some unexpected things that we will either like or benefit from, and things that we’ll dislike and want to get away from.
Study and study hard. We don’t just want to look at scholarships; we want to overachieve and have scholarships look at us, just as colleges do. Try to be the best that you can be every day, and remember life’s not a race. Sometimes you have to slow down and look at things from a different perspective, whatever the case may be. If anything, I would like for you to take a slower approach to life and enjoy it, because we might last long, but not forever. Overall, I want you to be able to look back on me as I’m writing all of this and say that it was worth it. Keep speaking your mind, work hard to play hard, and have fun. Live the best life you can live.
Gold Afeniforo – De La Salle Institute – DMSF Class of 2029
Photo Credit: Dilok – Adobe Stock