There are a few words that I need to say about high school.
“But why?” Many people ask me. “It’s high school.” It’s almost like everyone knows high school will be a bad experience. There’s something negative to be interpreted from a phrase like that. But truth be told, being a first-generation American and the oldest sibling with few friends (or friends that didn’t have my best interests at heart), I had no idea what was to come.
As a 14-year-old eighth grader excitedly waiting for middle school to be over, I remember the form that day we picked ninth-grade classes. I knew what I wanted to take, and when I saw a class called “Writing for Publications,” my hand flew to place a checkmark in the box. Finally. A class where I could write what I wanted to write.
1. Freshman Year
Writing for Publications was the first of a string of disappointments and traumas that high school brought me. On my first day of freshman year, I waited in line eagerly to pick up my final schedule only to look at it confused. I saw the card I was dealt. When I walked into a stale, old classroom with 30 other students who had signed up for the same class, we were told that we were going to be writing for the school newspaper instead. Writing for Publications disappeared and was canceled for reasons that weren’t entirely clear.
But at the time, I didn’t think much of it. I wrote articles for the newspaper, learned the ropes of interviewing and reporting, and put myself out there. Thankfully, the editorial staff were mostly graduating seniors and truly did everything they could to help a scared freshman like me. They were some of the chillest people (and might I say, only) I met in high school.
When I say mostly, there are a few exceptions. One cycle, I decided to write an article for the arts and entertainment section. Naively, I raised my hand that day in class and watched the editor-in-chief write my name down. That’s when I came to terms with the arts and entertainment editor.
And that’s when I met my very first high school bully.
A grade above me, even though we were born in the same year. She wasn’t a typical high school bully in the Regina George way—she wasn’t the most popular and didn’t have many friends. I still remember what she said when I walked up to her, asking about my article and if there were any edits I should make.
“Your article was so bad that I didn’t know how to edit it.”
Or something along those lines.
I avoided her for the rest of the year and wrote for other sections in the newspaper. Everything else in my life was going well—I was getting grades that I considered good and had two friends I ate lunch with. One that I had known since middle school, and the other since elementary school. We sat together every day behind tall weeds that never got trimmed.
I remember anxiously choosing classes for sophomore year, perhaps signing up for more than I could handle. Having a balanced workload was something that I learned years later. In contrast, this was something that peers knew from the very beginning. On top of having an awareness of the inner politics of my high school, my peers took their high school classes accordingly. They demonstrated a deeper awareness of the system as a whole. In fact, people knew a lot from the beginning.
Counselors yelled at us to take more APs and Honors, do more extracurriculars, do sports, and do more overall. It felt like whatever I was doing wasn’t enough. The tide that I was now caught in pulled me further and further from my real life and who I was. In this effort to be a “well-rounded” college applicant, going to school with people who knew the system and who had been preparing for this since childhood, along with the horrible rudeness and pettiness I faced from so many different people, I slowly felt myself slipping away from who I was.
2. Sophomore Year
Sophomore year was a difficult one. I took two honors classes with teachers who were infamous for making the material much harder than it needed to be. After my grandma passed away and I came back from the funeral, it took me a while to get adjusted back into the normal school routine. But despite the difficulties I was facing, I somehow earned good grades. Some of my teachers were surprised with me, some had empathy, while others like my journalism teacher just didn’t care at all. My journalism teacher had established relationships with several people in the class. She barely acknowledged my existence despite all of the blood, sweat, and tears I was putting in.
That semester, the girl in my journalism class who said that one rude remark delivered the first of multiple traumas that she gave me. She changed the designs for my section, arts and entertainment (yeah, I ended up taking over her section) that I worked so hard on, sending them to the publisher without letting me know of the last minute changes. I stayed after school until 8 p.m. that day, skipping basketball practice to get these designs in on time. My heart dropped as I saw hours and hours of work undone in a matter of minutes. I told the teacher about what happened, but her leniency and lack of strictness towards this girl were loud.
The bully apologized to me, but she didn’t stop.
Soon, my teachers started reprimanding me for my performance in some classes. I was running behind on the copious amounts of assignments and essays that were given. Balancing the newspaper, a sports team, and honors classes while dealing with grief, getting bullied, and dealing with health problems that I didn’t know about until years later, it was surprising to me that my teachers didn’t bother to understand or empathize. Some of them had started considering this slip as a reflection of my worth as a student.
My tenth-grade math teacher claimed that “I didn’t know how to learn”, my literature teacher sent me over to detention in a forceful attempt for me to finish my essay and turn it in despite my previous communications with her that I needed more time, and my chemistry teacher yelled at me for 20 minutes, accusing me of not trying hard enough along with other personal attacks that I won’t mention. I had a similar publicly humiliating experience in my history class about an essay I submitted–my teacher had called me over while the class was watching a movie and said a few unkind criticisms of his own.
3. Junior Year
Going into junior year, almost every single person I came into contact with treated me with disrespect in some way. It was as if my presence triggered people. It wasn’t my fault that my peers and even employees were acting in questionable ways.
I remember my AP Chemistry teacher handing out an exam to a student early in the supply closet, out of sight from the classroom. I went there to ask my teacher if I could get my exam back, and I was refused. The teacher coldly replied, “If you ask one more time I won’t let anyone do test corrections.” I remained silent. I could sense the teacher felt guilt because then she said, “This student has another situation.” After the incident, I was at my desk in the classroom working, when the peer sitting across from me told me he didn’t know why the teacher had refused to give me my exam back.
Meanwhile, that second semester of junior year–almost a year after my grandmother’s passing– my journalism bully gave me the most painful and traumatizing experience of my life. In a daze of stress and brain fog, I had chosen to write an article for a special issue that she and her friend were working on.
When I started working on the article, they edited my article once over an approximately month-long production cycle. I worked on those edits to the best of my ability, but after that, there was virtually no communication from them. I didn’t hear from them until the end of the production cycle when I saw the published issue.
And suffice it to say, the article was no longer mine.
The words were rewritten and my name was nowhere to be seen. Instead, their names were bolded along with a staff writer who I had no idea they were working with on the new version of my article. To add insult to injury, my journalism bully and her friend had given me an F for the article I had written.
And I was failing the entire class.
They knew which buttons to push, however I knew I needed to be professional. I walked over to them calmly and asked what happened to the article. What I heard in response were laughs and sneers, as if a demon had possessed them, saying that I “half-assed” the article with other insults to my face. My journalism teacher sat inches away from us, typing away at her laptop and pretending she wasn’t hearing anything. I looked around and saw everyone else doing the same, eyes glued to their computer screens but ears undoubtedly open.
I felt destroyed that day. I came home in tears with my parents deeply concerned. The three years of torture and bullying I had endured from friends, neighbors, classmates, teachers, administrative employees, and others finally caught up to me. Because talking it out in person failed, with my entire GPA at stake, I wasn’t going to back down without a boundary. I messaged the group chat and confronted them about the entire situation. They weaponized my responses and blamed me, taking the focus away from the plagiarism and instead asserting that all too familiar assumption that had purged me my entire high school career: that the article “wasn’t up to standard” and that I was incapable, unworthy, and a loser.
My journalism bully and her friend took screenshots of what I said and sent them over to the teacher. The teacher was unable to be an outside third party and vocally sided with them, trying to tear me down for my reaction. A reaction that was the result of a build-up of three years of toxic bullying and abuse. The teacher took me outside the next day, as if I was the only one at fault, and sat me down.
She asked me how I was feeling. I said I was feeling taken advantage of. She was silent. And then I told her to call them outside, wanting to know why they did it. Although visibly unwilling, the teacher called them outside. I asked them why, and they started playing the victim, bursting out crying and making a show of hugging each other. I told them the plagiarism violated school policy, to which the journalism teacher said absolutely nothing. The teacher proceeded to say, “Manavi, they said they would fix it!” I kept going, knowing that the teacher wasn’t going to do anything, but the teacher yelled my name again, opened the door, and forced me to go back inside. Everyone remained glued to their computers, not daring to look in my direction.
In the following days, however, it looked like my defense had ignited some trace of positive change. My journalism teacher changed my grade and the two girls re-released a new version of the issue, this time with my name on it. For the rest of the semester, however, the two girls and the journalism teacher amplified their bullying efforts. In another math class, one of the bullies switched seats to another group. In the next production cycle, with both of them leading idea generation, they never called my name despite me raising my hand the entire time, resulting in me not having an article to write that issue. My journalism teacher gave me dirty looks for the rest of the year. Whenever I needed something from her, I attentively watched that split second in which her dirty look suddenly contorted to one of the fakest smiles I had ever seen.
4. Senior Year
Similar dynamics continued in other classes during my senior year. I quit journalism and took AP Literature, which was a choice that I am proud of because I felt appreciated and heard by my amazing teacher. In my Java and Government classes, I was still being disrespected by teachers and peers. I remember my government teacher blaming me for something the entire class was doing, to which I left the classroom mid-session in tears.
A few weeks later, he dared to tell me that I needed to “learn how to control my emotions.”
5. Life After Graduation
By the time high school was over, it was like finally breaking out of this prison that held me captive for four years. As I walked across the stage with my hard-earned diploma, I heard my mom cheering me on. The only one in the audience to do so. And right after, I heard another family laughing their pants off. I asked my mom after the ceremony what that was about. She said that yes, the laughs were targeted toward her because she was cheering me on. But, that didn’t bother me anymore because I was finally done. I also didn’t bother going to a mediocre planned graduation party that felt equivalent to a Chuck E Cheese’s birthday.
Although the next few years in college remained difficult with a global pandemic, perhaps I have come to learn that nothing is ever really destroyed. It’s taken some time to rebuild, learn new things about myself, and heal, but it’s given me a deeper knowledge of why people do things. It allowed me to develop resilience, self-belief, and new pride over my accomplishments that people tried so hard to discredit, ruin, and sabotage.
Do I still wish that my high school experience never happened? 100 percent. Do I think I would have been better off attending another high school? Of course.
Going to a competitive high school in Silicon Valley made me realize how shallow and draining the environment was. Some students sacrificed their entire childhoods to get into top-name schools. Friends and classmates constantly criticized me for being me, tried to prove me a bad person, that I was incapable and unworthy, and that I was a people pleaser, all because I unknowingly went against the norms. Peers were competing with me even when I was at my lowest points, having resources, knowledge, and connections that I could only dream of having. I would say that was a testament to my drive, internal motivation, and merit, which was noticed during those painful years.
To these societal expectations that make high school kids push themselves harder than ever before, the system that pits high school students against each other entraps them in a scarcity mindset and makes high school kids push themselves to the point of exhaustion and burnout. It makes many students scared, tired, and anxious about the future. Plants need water to grow. Flowers need a proper environment to bloom. Without those things, the very thing that society tells us to ensure we’re successful can very well be the thing that affects our future success.
Nothing is ever truly destroyed. Let the haters hate. Stand firm in your ground. College is still around. No matter where you end up, college can be that environment where you can grow and reach your full potential. Who said that we needed to accomplish all of our life’s dreams within the confines of high school when our lives have barely started? We have our entire lives to be accomplished and productive members of society.
Have you ever felt pressure to overwork yourself for the sake of “success”? Let us know @HerCampusSJSU!