The Fall of My Senior Year

Have you ever felt alone? Or different from your peers around you? Like you’re less than them or people just treat you differently for no exact reason. Well if so, I have also dealt with something similar, and it wasn’t easy for me at all. It was during high school. I fell into a depression from it and found my way back up. From doing that, I gained strength on how to deal with haters. Now, I’m able to help others who also “stand alone”, so please enjoy my journey on how I stood alone.

During my senior year of high school, I had a life changing event that hit me unexpectedly. Football season had just started and I was loving it. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I consider myself a valuable player to the football team. Not only as a player, but also as a leader. I was voted team captain my junior year of high school and was lucky enough to be captain again my senior year. I was very happy to lead my team again for a second time. The beginning of the season went great, as we won most of our games and I had great stats for my record. It was my goal to be the best state player for my conference. I knew I could achieve it because the year before, as a junior, I got awarded honorable mention. The cards were all in my hands and I was loving it.

That all went away when randomly a sickness took down my body and I was unable to attend school and play football. I was just stuck on the sidelines watching my team need me and I was unable to help bring them to victory. Being unable to lead them to victory brought me guilt and shame. It didn’t stop there. My own teammates started to hate on me. Kids were saying I was faking it, and I shouldn’t be captain because I couldn’t even show up to practices or games. I didn’t feel like I was a part of the team anymore. I felt like I let my coaches and teammates down. The worst part is that the doctors couldn’t even find what was wrong with me–even to this day it remains a mystery. My family spent thousands of dollars on medical help and had doctor’s notes for the school, which proved that I actually wasn’t faking… which everyone believes I did anyways. The harassment didn’t stop on the field, it continued in the classroom as well. Kids who I don’t even know that well started treating me differently. My own classmates belittled me, sadly also the teachers. No matter where I went, I couldn’t escape the shame and guilt. To me, just never showing up meant I didn’t have to face it. The problem with that is that my close friends would tell me what others would say about me while I wasn’t there to defend myself. It seemed as if everyone had an opinion about me, even people who had nothing to do with my life. Almost all of the comments were negative. In the days that I did show up to school, everyone acted like they were best friends with me, when the day before, they talked down on me. They treated me
like I was less, and I hadn’t done anything to those people.

Yet, I still got all the hate when I had already been through enough with missing my last season of football, and now my school life is a living hell because of it. The depression that I gained from this experience destroyed me. I fell behind in school, and lost all self-confidence. I felt like an empty shell and I wasn’t even myself anymore. Instead, a disgrace to my family, my friends, and to the world. I felt like I was standing alone in this world with no one there who cared. I wanted to just disappear off the face of the earth, so I could stop the stress of this pain.

Throughout this life-changing event, I had a hard time trying to get a hold of it. I would push myself and my body past a point I shouldn’t have. All of that, just to go to school and try to practice with my team, but ended up making it worse. My body and mind started to fail on me and I let thoughts and ideas around me take control. I felt sorrow, I felt pain, and most importantly, I felt lost. As I said earlier, I didn’t even feel like myself anymore. It felt like I was standing alone. I would wake up every day and have a heavy weight of stress and guilt. Not getting up was the only way in the world to make it go away. Towards people I acted like nothing was wrong and that shutting them out was the only way I could deal with them. In school, not showing my face meant I didn’t have to live up to the shame. For my family, acting like I was fine and nothing was wrong meant I didn’t have to face the guilt in front of my family. By doing that, I didn’t have to accept that it was affecting me.

I believe everyone should start treating others with respect and follow the golden rule, “treat others the way you want to be treated”. So now when I see other people, I always treat them with kindness because you never know when someone is having a hard time. I do this with people I don’t know as well because I would never want to make others feel shamed by me like the way I felt shamed during my experience. A way to deal with haters is by simply ignoring them. If you just ignore them, their words can’t cut, and you are still in control of your feelings. You will be stronger than the haters around you who only drag people down rather than lift people up.

My dark senior experience left scars on my well-being. This experience made me feel alone, and because of this, it was hard to sort out those feelings I had went through. Losing my last football season affected me in a way I could’ve never imagined myself going through. Because of this circumstance, I now know how to better treat others around me and how to help others who stand alone.

“Tree standing alone in Brockton fields, Stanley Park, foggy” by colink. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.