Here's Food for Thought:
Last time I was here, I said you have to learn how to fall in order to jump high -- and I guess it's time to take a bit of medicine. One thing I regret is not applying to more Early Action schools this year, because it's not necessarily fun to be the awkward person who hasn't received a favorable word from a school. Not that, I was heartbroken to see "you've been deferred" from my dream school, and not being able to enhance my much-in-need scholarship fund really had me thinking that I was stuck. Then, while scrolling through Google+, I saw someone had shared my post recently and who knew I could be so insightful, even for myself?
I read my own words which I had posted just a few months ago and there, I found a liveliness that felt foreign to me. I was reading the story of a girl who was experiencing successes that she would never thought of just a few years ago, a girl filled with ambition and vision who was willing to go after what she wanted -- and it was then that I realized that this fall may have actually been good for me. Possibly, falling after trying to climb so much and so hard made me realize what's really important to me since "being on top of the world" put me out of touch with my roots, my original perspective. I remember receiving a shirt that my aunt designed for me, "based on my personality": right above my heart it says "don't just reach for the sky, touch the stars." Yet if I have to jump, leave the world that helped form that same ambition, I'd rather just bring the stars to me. I'm taking back my ambition, going back to my roots, embracing my original dreams -- that's more important than I can get on any Jupiter.
The Energy Fair that I've wanted to do for the past 3 years, I'm going to make it a reality. I have a greater vision for a community festival this year and I'm making sure it happens. The one thing that I've learned from my successes is to not get caught on them. Success doesn't make us who we are. In many ways our victories and prizes are really the result of it. Don't become stuck and fall into that trap -- you are more than such. All of us have striven to fulfill our dreams and explore our interests: whether it's becoming a programmer or part of the electronics team for a robotics competition like I have, presenting your experience at MITES to other students, or surpassing the odds to pursue top schools and recognition, each and every one of us have gifts of which we cannot conceive. As MITES students or not, college-accepted or not, with scholarships in our hands or with nothing in them, if we define ourselves by what we gain, by what others give us, we limit ourselves to it and cannot fully visualize the magnitude of what we could become. I stepped upon this path of thought but fortunately I caught myself before I fell into this spiral. We all have purpose, meaning, capabilities that we ourselves could never imagine: the sum of the parts does not equal our whole. Please never forget those words. For us to inspire others, we must first find inspiration in ourselves.
