A person is not a high schooler if they didn’t have a 3:00 AM existential crisis that goes from worrying about college, to thinking about your friends who might not like you, and to finally pondering about how underprepared you are about the AP Exams that are coming up soon. A high school student is expected to have a perfect grades, while also being an award-winning athlete, a leader in every club they do, and be an all-state level musician.

Now let’s be realistic. Except that one cousin your parents always compare you to, (almost) no one has extracurriculars and grades that match the criteria above. Instead of holding your life together with two hours of sleep and deadly amounts of caffeine, there are much better ways to approach this.

One of the best ways to approach this is by understanding that you are not perfect. Nobody is perfect. By letting a report card define your worth, you are essentially letting one thing define who you are. Don’t get me wrong; grades are important, but it shouldn’t be taken to an extent when you are checking Genesis every 30 seconds to see if your grade changed.

By pursuing perfection, you are going to sacrifice the fun parts of high school. You are going to sacrifice meeting up with your friends, sleeping in, and you are going to constantly spending all your time chasing something that is virtually impossible.

Extracurricular activities are also a huge other concern. Rather than signing up for so many clubs that you practically stay at school until 8, you should sign up for a few clubs that you have fun with. And if you are concerned about leadership, you should know that if you are passionate about something, you are going to put your time into it and get leadership. The advisor is going to see that you are passionate about the club and not just doing it for the leadership.

In the end, it is important to accept that it is okay to not be okay. It’s okay not to have every single thing in your life figured out. The pressure to be perfect is something that is destroying the fun of high school today. Sure, it is important to do well in high school, but it is also important to have fun, keep your sanity, and keep some sort of identity of yourself. It is okay to not stress about college 24/7, it is okay to skip a club meeting to take a break, and it is okay to get a low score on a test.