Recess during this all-nighter

Tonight, I decided to pull an all-nighter. Why? Because I literally have close to nothing done. I’m behind in almost every class and I am starting to question why. Then I started think about the research essay, which led me to thinking about junior high which led me to thinking about who I used to be. I was literally the crazy girl who would throw a fit if I didn’t get my 100%. I was the girl who spent 15 hours on a project for my health class to build something that showed myself off to the class when my friend made his in 5 minutes before the class started. Literally, during passing time. I was the girl who spent 24 hours making an American flag out of hundreds and hundreds of pieces of tissue paper and, in the end saying each represented troops who had died fighting for freedom. Who even knows what the assignment was, I doubt the teacher even cared. He just cared that this flag would never be taken down from his wall and he could always talk about it. I pushed myself so hard that I had to be ahead, smarter, better until my 8^th grade English teacher pulled me aside and said, “Taylor, you are going to burn out.” But that didn’t even begin to stop me. I went even crazier, I needed to prove I could win the battle against boredom and too much work and not enough sleep. But it won. I didn’t even realize until now that it did. She was right. I went from being this perfect, extra-mile, “shoot for the stars” student to being one who just wants to be done with school work so she can watch a movie. Or sleep. Or something that does not require anything like thinking. Bleugh.

                What I know now is that I need to find a way to fall back into love with school. I need to find a way to believe I can be that student who will get 100% and who will achieve high honors and who will do it all at once. One thing I miss more than anything, is my love for reading. My mother used to call me Belle because I used to, literally, never put a book down. I knew the floor plan of my house so well just because I would walk it again and again trying to get around while I was reading. I would sit at the dinner table and my mother would have to take my book away from me so I would eat and sit with nice European manners. But this is gone now. Somewhere between getting burned out once I hit high school and having a teacher who never assigned a single book and never gave us time in our lives to read a single book, I forgot to read and I forgot to keep on loving reading. I literally found every way to get out of reading but now I know that needs to change. I need to fall in love with reading and academics and standing tall and proud when you say “I am an honors kid and I am proud of it.” I need to remember what it was like to stand before that class with a project that took me weeks and see them tear up because, somehow, I made this project real.  So this is my all-nighter that I hope will change something.