You’ve been told since you were born that school is the most important thing in life; if you don’t ever receive that piece of paper and handshake, you will royally fail at life. That’s a partial lie, however, it is something you should achieve in life. But here I lay passed out 13 weeks later suffocated by textbooks, notebooks, folders, pens, pencils, highlighters, markers, half-done projects, final exam study guides, flashcards, test study guides, and quizzes from not only this trimester’s work, but last trimester’s. I am drowning in the misery that is high school all because I missed 11 weeks of school. I should be coffee’s spokeswoman.

I suppose if I were a freshman missing all this school that would give me time to screw up and fix my mistakes. But I’m a junior preparing for adulthood; I don’t have room for mistake. I am spending late nights wondering if getting a diploma is worth all of this exhaustion and stress. But, sadly, I’m not the next Bill Gates and most likely neither are you. Your education should be your focal point for at least your high school career, and if after you graduate, you decide not to go to college, that’s fine. You can do a lot more with a diploma than without one. However, college is a time when you can study things that you want to learn, not stuff your forced to learn, so why not go for a couple years? If money is an issue you can get scholarships, financial aid, or loans. In life, you should learn so many different things in different categories that you could become a walking Google.

My advice to you is to, at the bare minimum get B’s and C’s, make it a priority to walk across that stage, don’t stress over missing school, and learn more things than your brain can contain… And don’t get kidney stones.