Personal Narrative: My Extreme Failure

A time when I experienced extreme failure was when I was in my sophomore year of high school. When I started the year, I had the mindset of, “This is going to be easy. I’m not going to sweat it.” Reason being, in my freshman year, I passed all my classes easily and I thought the next school year would be the same. I was in for a rude awakening by then. It was my first year starting an AP class and I heard stories that it was going to be easy if one paid attention in class. As the first semester went, it was a struggle already. I had easily underestimated the workload and found myself barely passing with a C. I have the type of personality where I put a lot of pressure on myself and stress out easily; as one can imagine, I was very hard on myself.
This affected me not only academically but socially and athletically. The stress of the work isolated me from my peers and this caused them to complain to me in which I was pressured to work extra hard to complete my studies to make time for them. In addition to the weight of trying to pass and maintain a social life, I had to go to extensive hours of after school practices for my school’s water polo team. As part of the team, they relied on me to play my part and it made me feel burdened to practice harder to make up for my lack of good grades. Because of my naivety on how to balance a high school life, my anxiety was beginning to build. The next semester the pace got faster and the workload doubled. I was horrified with myself that I couldn’t catch up. I found all my classmates around me struggling as well but it felt like I got the brunt of it. It came to a point—my tipping point—when I was depressed and at that moment, I gave up. I thought, “If I can’t even pick up my grade then there’s no point in trying.” By then, it was rounding the end of the school year. My parents were breathing down my neck and treated me harshly to get my grades up but I