Be yourself

By Evan Wasik

DURING the eighth grade I started feeling more comfortable expressing myself around other people. Cool, I thought. I was having more fun and really enjoying my newfound freedom. But I was getting in trouble more, because I was being disruptive in school. At first I thought it was OK, and nothing was really wrong. Wrong!

I saw that the people I was talking to didn't get good grades. And because I was talking, I started missing things said in class, such as the due dates of assignments. My behavior started to bring my own grades down until they were lower than they'd ever been before. I started to think about why this was happening.

Maybe it was because I was talking. But I was talking because I thought that was part of being myself. How could something this good—being myself—result in something bad—low grades? I struggled with this for a while.

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