Hey future me! This is 17 year old me writing to you currently at 9/17/2020 8:35 pm so you can look back at this and see where you were in the world and the emotions you were going through. Well, to be honest! I’m pretty stressed mostly by school and just the idea of what to do with my capstone project. Just like the rest of my friends and peers at my school, I’m confused. I don’t know what I should do, and what avenue I want to go down to in terms of giving back to my community. I’ve been racking my brain looking for something that I know I would enjoy not only as a student looking to learn something from the world, but also anything that can help prepare me for the world I’m going to enter. Although, not only that but also an idea to help keep me happy throughout my senior year and not frustrated over the fact that I might be doing something that I’m not really enjoying and won’t grow to wish I did something differently as I grow up. I knew when I came into high school that I wanted to do anything with mental health that might help spread awareness for it and make it easier for kids to be able to come out with it for those that aren’t able to though, it’s been stressful on how to come up with ideas that are even possible with the coronavirus happening around us. Especially with online school as well, it’s also been really weird to learn how to work with the system and succeed in it when I’m trying to simply just learn it. That’s not a problem though, the summer was really fun though sort of also weird to realize that it was also one of my last summers before college. I’m really grateful to even have had the time I had in the summer and the time I had with my girlfriend before we broke up over the course of the summer because it was a time of learning and growth and I believe I came out a better person in the end though I wish I had more time in the summer before my senior year since college seems really tense and scary. That’s what I hope to be able to say about my capstone experience as well because I believe that growing as a human being is essential to your own health and happiness. If you spend your time doing something you aren’t really fond of, then you’ll grow to be unhappy and I believe that mental health is a really important aspect of life that still needs to be talked about. As I’m typing this, I realize that I’m saying I hope a lot but I guess it’s normal when you’re looking at the future and thinking of what you want as a person, and I hope that this will be a fun experience and something to look forward to being nostalgic about. Online learning has been fun though, it’s a nice change of pace and allows me to work on things on my own time which is nice to help teach me time management for college. It also gives me some time to look and research on things instead of being rushed in class or being forced to slow down. Regardless though, this year has been a fun year of self-learning and growth that I hope I will be able to use in my later years as an adult. Senior year has been an okay one though, there’s been barely any time to hang out with my friends recently though I’ve gone to the park with a few of my friends and played basketball though it wasn’t really anything meaningful that I would look back on and be like it was something to learn from. Though I’m not really sure what I’d learn from this looking back on it in the future though maybe as I write more and more I’ll get better at this and it’ll start to make more sense and convey more emotions. Though this year has been a lot more fun than previous years but more stressful though, then again I feel as though every year has been more stressful than the last and that’s why I will take this year easy though and enjoy my last year of high school. Thank you, though. Hey future me! This is 17 year old me writing to you at 9/17/2020 9:02 PM saying goodbye though.
- So far, I’ve decided that I want to run the virtual book club from Capstone up for grabs because I want to give back to children who were just like me looking for an avenue to escape reality from but that was also enjoyable that wasn’t just games either. I’ve always felt like books were an easy way to escape whatever you were going through, looking back on my childhood I constantly remember being in a busy class with all the kids yelling around me while I’d open my book and try to block out the noise, only enjoying whatever came in from the book. Whether it was on the bus, inside my class or at home whenever I found the time to get off the computer, I’d spend my time reading and I’ve always found it as a way to breathe, the smell of an old book you picked up, the visual difference between each text and its font, the feeling of knowledge being moved at your fingertips, the crackling of the paper as you move them, all of that has always been alluring to me. There’s some sort of knowledge to be offered in every book regardless of its quality, and as I grew older, books became less relevant as we aged due to technology or social media or whatever, and it’s even worse for these kids that are young now since technologies more advanced and the opportunities they go through as they get older are more likely to get slimmer in terms of someone recommending them a book. Sure your friends can send you a magazine article and you can read that, but it’s not the same as reading a book, a classic you realize that thousands of people before you enjoyed and realized the value of it. Even if it isn’t a book you love with all your heart, you go through it realizing that these books, these hundreds of pages of knowledge were passed down to us to be read and learned from so that us, as their descendants, can learn from their mistakes and grow from them as well as well as the added bonus that reading makes you more happy and it’s why I want to learn how reading can affect children who start early compared to late starters and the affect it has on their mental health. If children spent as much time as they did on social media, would they be as focused and negative on their self image compared to instead of focusing on how amazing that model looks, how intelligent that character they love is, or how well structured the book they’re reading is. I do genuinely believe that if these kids find a different way to outlet their emotions, they’d be happier as a result. This happiness is hard to come by though, and I’d also like to focus on how instead of these teenagers forming their beliefs on how skinny that instagram model is and how much they want to be like them, they should form their own beliefs without the help of their peers peer pressuring them to look like everyone else, and become their own individual. I’m going to keep researching though on the topic and see the effect books have on mental health, and if they have any at all. I’ve emailed Mrs. Finkenstein around several times so far and I’m still waiting for a response but I’m hopeful that she’ll respond soon and that it’s just a fluke since she’s busy with her new kids. If not, I’m not really sure why she isn’t responding but anyways I’ll ask Mrs. Boutilier next semester which is coming up fairly soon. It does feel really weird that I’m about to enter my last semester as a high school student, I really hope I do well and that I don’t fail but I realize that it’s up to me and choosing to make the right decision instead of procrastinating. Everyone so far throughout high school has told me Capstone isn’t hard, it simply just takes time and your effort to commit to something. This is why I chose the virtual book club thing as well since I love books, and I love that I have the ability to give back to the kids younger than me so they can get the same gift of books younger than me, being able to tune out the noise and focus on whatever reality you were living in for that week. This is 17 year old me writing at 1/3/2021 5:18 PM saying thanks for everything.
Looking back on December, I realized that nothing really did change. Maybe I did in terms of realizing that the clock was ticking and the end of my high school career is coming to an end but I’ve always had that creeping realization ever since the start of last summer. I just realized that it isn’t about giving back to your community more than it is finding something to do for yourself that made highschool worth it instead of remembering all the embarrassing moments or even the fun moments, you can remember the moment where you gave back to something or someone, made something of yourself. Even if it was just for a moment, you were bigger than yourself and you didn’t feel the need to go to college to do it, or become rich to do it, you give back to your community and in turn, you get the feeling of success without all the added inputs by society. You felt like you were giving a part of yourself to grow within that community, and you know it will when you leave. Just as how our mentors and idols as we grew older left a lasting impact on us, we hope to leave a lasting impact on the community not only a lasting impression, but a good one. A good one is all that matters to us since this community is what shaped us, even if it was for good or bad, it all depends on your experiences, but either way it shaped us. We’ll learn over time how it did, and when we grow older, we’ll use it as our reasoning for why we don’t like this situation anymore, or why we like it now since high school is important. It’s important to the country as a whole in terms of having an educated workforce, but it’s important to us since it’s what shapes us as human beings, and capstone at the end is what solidifies it as the end result of what high school has come to make us as. Whether we’re a philanthropic patriot for our country, sending money back to our country who isn’t doing too well with corona, or we’re disillusioned teenagers looking to make a difference on something just to pass, it shows what high school made us out to be. Whether we took the results of our high school life and decided to push forward and grow, or we took them and decided to use it as a reason to give up and stay stagnant. I believe that capstone is important for these reasons, it shows the people in front of us what we were, but us as we get older where we were in life, and what we were hoping to get out of it. Whether what we got out of it was worth it or not in the end or simply just a grade is how we look at it when we grow older, some of us will hate Capstone, and some of us will love it. But that’s the nature of Capstone, it’s always changing just like the high school students who come to take the torch from the people before them and that change is what drives us as a society forward. It helps us realize where we’ve improved, and where we’ve come from and where maybe we can do better and it helps us come to those conclusions of what we like or not. A shaping experience ready to coalesce and mold us into the human beings we are going to be one day. Some people may think it’s useless but I do believe that it has something to do with us as a people and realizing that the people we are today aren’t going to be the same people we are ten years from now, and it’s like us now looking back at pictures of us as a baby missing how sweet and innocent we were but how far we’ve come and how far we will continue to go, and grow as long as we keep our head up and get ready for the adult world. It’s not only just about adulting us but, more of letting us control the clay and forming where the shapes go. Whether we create a skyscraper, or a wobbly foundation is up to us, and we’ll continue to grow wherever that shape takes us. Thanks for everything. This is 17 year old me writing at 2/5/2021 5:44 PM saying good luck in life, love it.
- Okay! So, for my capstone project I’ve confirmed that it’s going to be a virtual book club and that I need to email Mrs. Turner or another teacher to be my mentor since Mrs. Finkenstein hasn’t responded and doesn’t seem like she’s going to at all. Now that I got my idea out of the way, I’ve been thinking about my research question and I think it’s going to be about how reading at a younger age & being exposed to healthier escapes when you’re younger can affect your mental health. Writing it down I just thought that maybe it’s too pretentious and that it’d be too difficult of a question to answer but I do believe that I can do it. I know I’m no scientist so I can’t measure the amount of serotonin in their head before and after nor do I have the time to do a long study like that but I do think I can look at someone’s face and body language (if god permits us to go back) and notice an increase in overall happiness in life. Maybe, if I’m lucky enough I can also develop a close working relationship with one of the middle schoolers and be a sort of mentor to them as well and help them learn from life which will help me see how overall they are satisfied with life. If I can get that as one of my research questions I’d be happy since I really do before I leave for college want to prove that or not even prove but see that books can have as much of an effect on someone’s life as it did mine. I do think that it’s sort of selfish and that maybe I’m using the kids who will join the virtual book club but I do think my capstone is a perfect way to test this out while also giving out to the community since I know books can’t have as much of a negative impact on someone’s mental health as social media can so I know I’m not posing any risks to someone’s mental health by inviting them to the book club. When I first heard about capstone though, I wanted to do something related to OCD and mental health while also bringing awareness to it but I wasn’t really sure on how to do it though I was thinking of somehow incorporating that into the book club as well, offering weekly messages on the google classroom I’ll post for it talking about mental health awareness, offering support and guidance if
anyone needs it, and finding professional help to offer for free i.e. hotlines for mental health for these students since even though I know the teachers try their best to help students with that, sometimes it’s just hard for them to talk to you guys about it and I want to offer these students a different gateway than just teachers. Thinking about what you said in class, I don’t want to get “close” with them since I know when I leave for college they’ll be hurt, though I do want to be a sort of spiritual guide for them and offer them assistance with whatever they need as well throughout the book club. I do believe that I’m taking on too much responsibility for just a book club though and should just focus on doing the book club but I guess this is what the journals are for. Venting out things you forget to do in class and getting your opinion on them. Anyways, I hope you read this and see my thoughts on it, I’m interested in hearing back from you on it since I do want to be of more help for people that need it and lean into what I wanted to do since I first entered this school. I look forward to hearing from you, and thank you for your time and advice for us students. We may not be sure of what to do, but we are learning and we’re doing it happily with you, thanks for always being cheerful Mrs. Boutilier and helping put a smile on people’s faces. This is 17 year old me from 2/05/2021 6:06 PM saying enjoy life for what it is, and whatever comes next, and you’ll be fine.
Hey there, future me! I hope you’re doing well. I’m writing this today because well of course it’s an assignment though I’m writing this so you can look back and remember where you were and how much you’ve come to grown hopefully. As senior year keeps approaching to an end and every teacher around me reminds of how fast it’s going to be, I keep thinking about the future. Where will I be? Will I grow and become something better? I hope I do. I constantly think about the future and what’s coming next for me. I hope it’s something that’s worth it and makes me happy. I don’t want to regret going into English as a major but I’m not sure what else to do. I love English as a whole though I realize I need a job to support myself and as much as I love giving back, I don’t believe I can be a teacher which seems to be the only job I can think of at the moment. Neither do I want to go into another major where I know the classwork would be unsatisfying and almost unbearable. This is just me ranting about what I’ve been thinking about I guess. Work is adding up and I need to start focusing though in this final stretch maybe I am getting some sort of senioritis. I’m not really sure, I know I’ll be able to find the motivation soon enough regardless. I’ve always recognized the importance of school, now it’s time to learn the work ethic to go along with it. I hope I do grow beyond what I am though and become a better person than what I am. It’d be nice to be something and make people happy though I’d like to make myself happy as well which is what I’m getting to. February was a good month though for my senior year regardless of my lack of motivation. I found a mentor for my project after months of emailing teachers (thanks Mrs. Boutilier for bringing her to my attention. I’m very grateful for that), I’m making the plans for my virtual book club which I am going to email her tonight about and I’m also going to be getting my community service done hopefully (though I’m not sure how that is working with corona, do I still need the mandated 30 hours or is it just 15 for capstone?). Regardless though, I’m glad to be in this situation and being able to graduate. I never thought it would come this fast but anyway, I’m glad it did despite my lack of motivation. I know the finish line is so close, I just need to get there. This is 17 year old me from 3/08/2021 10:06 PM saying you just need to focus, it’ll be okay, you’ll get there. Enjoy it.