THE ECHO

by Malak Marzak

The weight of junior year is crushing me, and I no longer care. 

I make my way through the familiar halls of Avon High School, wary of the deep bags under my eyes. As I walk, I force my body to keep moving despite the weak and exhausting sensations that have colonized my muscles and mind. At this point, it’s become muscle memory — the result of late nights spent poring over homework assignments, studying for tests, and preparing for presentations, all seemingly endless. While the eyebags may give away the fact that I’m  tired, my increasing numbness may not be so obvious. 

Junior year is the nightmare everyone hears about before even stepping foot into high school. It’s the year where you stack all your hardest academic classes, take the SAT, finalize extracurriculars, and prepare to commit to your future. The pressure turns on because it’s your last real shot to make yourself a contender for what’s next. And while the year on it’s own is incredibly difficult, the real nightmare is everything that led up to it. 

This is especially true for those who take their academics seriously. Since I can remember, I’ve taken every homework assignment and test to heart. Because at the time those grades defined my worth. I became devastated over anything short of perfection. Every academic loss felt like the end of the world — the end of my future. But after so many years of holding myself to high standards and stressing over every little thing, it becomes draining — especially when you finally reach the hardest year of high school: junior year. 

The motivation to go home and study, to spend hours absorbing information like some kind of sponge, disappears. But this feeling isn’t one of freedom, like I can finally relax. It’s a dull, throbbing numbness — the phenomenon of burnout. 

This is so easily mistaken for laziness. It’s easy to ask, “Who wants to do homework? Everyone has to so what’s so special about junior year?” But Highschool is like a marathon — and by junior year we’re running on a fracture. And just like running on a fracture, pushing yourself during junior year could possibly lead to it worsening. Maybe at this point we need isn’t pressure, but patience and hard earned rest. Because maybe the problem isn’t that we’re lazy, just that it’s just junior year.