Dear Eleven Year Old Me... by Bianca

Dear Eleven Year Old Me... by Bianca - April 2021 Scholarship Essay

Five years of life will give a person wisdom on multiple experiences. In the past five years, I have been through many experiences that I have been lucky enough to go through to learn and become a more knowledgeable person. I have been able to share my knowledge to multiple people, but if I were to specifically target myself five years ago, I would modify my advice to my old perspective and point of view. Advice that I would give myself five years ago is to beware of people that will take advantage of you, focus on school but do not make school your life, and relax and appreciate your free time while you have it.

My first piece of advice that I would give to myself five years ago is to beware of people that will take advantage of myself. I would give this advice to myself five years ago because I have been through many experiences over the last couple of years where a handful of people have taken advantage of me due to me trying to make others happy when possible. At the time I was too young to truly realize that I was taken advantage by that group of what I thought were friends until about a year after it occurred. I would like to give myself five years ago a warning on that so I will have a good head up to beware.

Focus on school while not making it your whole life would the second piece of advice that I would give to myself five years ago. There are a couple of reasons why I would give myself this advice. I would give myself this advice because over the past year I really dove into my schoolwork and although I still contributed to my extracurricular activities, I did not take part in as many extracurricular activities as I would have liked to due to trying to be balance and not wanting to spread myself too thin. Although I am ranked 6th in my class, I put too much pressure on myself to do as much as I could, and this did not work out well for me mentally or physically. Another reason I would give myself five years ago this advice is because due to stressing out on the amount of work I had in the little time I was provided; I was not able to make and hang out with friends as I used to do. This was devastating and was why I started to take a lighter load of work, to enjoy life. I realized that I was not experiencing the “full high school experience” that I had been looking forward to my whole life and is the main reason I would give myself five years ago the advice of focusing on school but not to the extent where it becomes your whole life.

The third piece of advice myself five years ago would receive from me is to relax and appreciate your free time while you have it. Now that I am sixteen and am balancing a lot between school and home life, I do not have much free time to sit down and take a breather. While back when I was eleven years old, I thought I did not have that much free time but compared to know it was all the time in the world. I would tell my past self to enjoy it as much as possible because it will not last forever. I would also tell myself to relax because when I was eleven years old, I would have been at the end of the fifth grade, about to venture off into the world of middle school, and I was stressed as much as a fifth grader could be able moving up in the school system. Therefore, I would tell myself to relax and to practically take it easy because it might seem like a lot, but it is not much after going through the hardest part of transitioning schools.

After reminiscing on my past experiences, the three main pieces of advice that I would give myself five years ago would be to beware of those who will try and take advantage of you, focus on school while not having it take over life experiences, and to relax and appreciate your free time while you have it.