I'm really sorry if this is poorly written...
At a glance, my life seems perfect. I have everything that a teenage girl could want- I have a boyfriend, a car once I get my license, and a chance to go to college. How could I not be happy? To be honest, I don't think any would say that I have a right to say that I'm not happy. All of those underprivileged kids in the world, they'd love to have the chance to be in my situation. But I'm just not happy. I have all of this freedom; this so-called choice to do whatever it is that I want to in life and to pursue my dreams. Yet when I really think about it, I don't have any dreams. Not really. My dream is something that's been instilled in me since I was a child. I spent my whole childhood being told that no matter what I was going to be a doctor. I'd be the daughter that would become everything my parents wanted, I'd make loads more money than my dad and when they were old I'd provide for them and take care of them and give them all of the luxuries they couldn't afford have while raising me and my sister. In a truly stereotypically Asian way of saying it, I'd bring honor to my family. I took the SAT this year. Prior to doing that I was spent the whole summer preparing, and then I spent months preparing with a tutor that charged exorbitant fees, all this so that I could get that amazing SAT score that would change my life. I ended up doing just okay. I bombed the writing section. My dad was in a word, disappointed. Really. Disappointed. So here I am again, preparing to retake it, living in constant fear and stress. All of my life I've just been working and working and working blindly towards this goal and I tell everyone that I want to be a doctor, maybe a plastic surgeon or something when I grow up. I tell everyone that yes, science is my favorite subject in school, yes it's so fun and I love learning and my greatest joy in life would be to go to Stanford and maybe major in Biology or Chemistry then go on to some medical school somewhere and then live out the rest of my life in contentment. My grandparents and the rest of my family think that I'm just this studious good girl that's going to be their pride and joy and I'll go to an amazing school because I just study all the time and I'm really smart and I'm going places. That's the lie that they have believed in for so long. I haven't only been lying to the rest of the world; I've been lying to myself too. I tell myself that this is what I want, that I really do enjoy going to my AP Bio class, that it'll all work out in the end. But every so often it seems like there's just this little nagging voice that's like, "no, Jie-En. This isn't what you want. This is never what you wanted. You know that." But I just don't have a choice. I've never been able to really choose who I wanted to be. When I was younger I used to say things like maybe I'll be a marine biologist instead, or maybe a teacher. And the reply I got every time was a chuckle and "You don't really want to do that. You won't be able to support yourself!" Even this year I tried it by casually mentioning that I maybe wanted to go to college for a communications major instead of some sort of science track. I was again laughed and waved off. Medicine is the only way to go, they said. But I thought to myself, I'm really not even that great at science. Sure, I get good grades in it and comparatively at my school it looks as if I have a knack for it. But it doesn't really make me happy. Social media and networking with people and things like that make me happy, and I think I'm pretty good at it. So wouldn't it make more sense for me to get a communications major? My parents, however, would never let me do it. It seems like I'm just trapped in this lie, unhappy and alone. To my parents, this is the ultimate betrayal. They've given me everything and the way I repay them is being ungratefully unhappy? To me, this is something that I just can't help. After years of just chugging ahead nonstop and studying so diligently, I've burned out. School is no longer fun, learning no longer is fun, and science doesn't interest me. I can't sit and study for anything anymore, just doing my homework makes me so bored I can't stand it. At first, I didn't understand it. This was the kind of behavior I attributed to the bad kids, the mediocre kids. I wasn't one of them. I should be doing my homework as soon as I get home and go to bed early. But instead I was watching Netflix till 1 AM and doing my homework the period before it was due. Finally, I learned to just let it go. I realized that I was doing it because I was unhappy, and skiving off my homework and watching funny videos made me feel, even if shallowly, happy. I don't think that I'm the only teen with this problem. In fact, I know that many other teens experience the same thing. We're just on this treadmill, running after the dangling carrot that is college and we are told over and over, college is the right thing to do college is where we're supposed to go college will make all of our dreams come true. But as we all run towards that goal we find that we never got a chance to make dreams of our own. In a sense, we're just hurtling toward our own self-destruction. None of us are happy. None of us know what would make us happy. We're just wanting and wanting for something that's shadowy and vague, the promise of happiness if we go to college.
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