Living by Valentina

Living by Valentina - August 2025 Scholarship Essay

I want to live. I want to break free from what I have been told to do for the past three years of high school. I don’t want to solely focus on studies, what friends to have, where to sit at lunch, how to act with these people, what game to go on, if you go to parties. We have been taught that these actions are how high school was, and if you didn’t follow them to how society wanted you to follow them, you were a goner.
For the first years of high school, nothing consumed me more than wondering if people liked me, and what is the right thing to say in order to fit it. It consumed my brain to the point where I wasn’t a person anymore, I was trapped in my brain and some toxic 15 year old was controlling me. I was constantly worried about lunch time, and social events that I dug myself into a hole that I kept digging as I went into my sophomore and junior year. Why did I care so much? That was the question I asked myself everyday. There was nothing more infuriating than wanting the answers to questions you didn’t have, but I wanted to know why the people around me were dictating my actions and my happiness. Nobody should be in control of my happiness, I can change the way I look at the world, and I knew that if I wanted to be saved from this hell hole, I needed out.
So, I decided to stop caring about what was going on around me, and just focus on me. If that means that I lose all my friends, so be it. If that means that people don’t like me, that's fine because I love myself, and that is all that matters. So, for this upcoming school year, I want to live as free as possible, and stop looking at the world around me through a hole, and instead look at it from the tallest mountain because nothing is going to degrade me, or push me down from living as happy as I want. I know that if I don’t stop this, it is only going to get worse, and I will eventually be digging my own grave, but when I see myself happy with the people I love, that is what motivates me to keep living on this mountain. I will achieve the best senior year with the people I love not caring about the world around me, instead, I will be with myself achieving greatness in my mind.