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Feb 2015
Highschool! Supposingly the “time of our lives” or where a study guide is more important than our mental state of being! It’s also the only place where you write thousand of definitions every year, but you can’t even define your self worth. Where you solve millions of equations, but you can’t even add up your life value. Solve for your life, school-health(life)= future. The definitive times of our lives are turning into the worst. Balancing your social wellbeing with the hell of being popular and skinny, even starving yourself for days because the queen bee bought herself the newest style, and it’s a size too small. Subtracting the calories from the equation of wanting to binge your heart out while cramming for the test of flirting with that new boy after school. Adding the new dress, new heels, and new personality to your already masked appearance because the party you got invited to is where the “prettiest” of girls add up your self worth for you solving for the simplest equation. Makeup(Skinny)(Big ****)(Tall)= PRETTY. The word everyone seems to have a definition for except you. A word that could try to define your schooling career, but you can’t find the correct sources. Then theres the nights where you stay up until the early dawn, sobbing yourself to sleep because you can’t remember how to do so on your own. The definition of sleep : A natural periodic state of rest for the mind and body. But who remembers that? How am I supposed to solve the equation of rest? These definitions make up your state of being, piercing to your brain like clothing labels, being ripped off when they are no longer needed. The equations make up your body, or what's naturally left of it. Memorizing everything a person says about you, adding up the looks you get in the hallways rushing to class, reading the syllabus to everyone’s expectations for you. Expectations. Expectations. EXPECTATIONS. They come as blurs, never specific or clear enough. They shove through your tired brain and ram your esteem up walls. The perfect image of a student and friend and girlfriend and PERSON. Applications come out, every question answered honestly, truthfully, a reflection of SELF. Self? Can you use that word in a sentence? Is there a way to solve it? You’ve thrown out the files to your internal layers, not seeming important enough to pass the next big history test or worthy of the SAT prep due in a week. You can’t pass the exam in your mind testing on the ability to stay sane and make it into the college in your brain because it’s been shut down due to: inclement conditions.  Add up all of this and you get the equation of highschool and equation to pass the social barrier. Congradulations! You’ve graduated someones judgement of your self worth and now you have to define it on your own.


Self (n:) a person's essential being that distinguishes them from others.


Distinguish from others. Different? NO! Suspension has kicked you out of the brain and difference is a TOTAL reputation ruiner. You’ve spent your entire life hypothesizing the idea of NORMAL. Different is an old definition with a new sound, wanting to be sweet and free. But in reality locked in a detention classroom, waiting for it to be used openly. It’s like this: run multiple copies of the same person on the copy machine and then paste them around the school with imitating personalities and similar words. The word different doesn’t apply to this equation.


Can you even use it in a sentence?  


Can I even be used in a sentence?


-e.m
A slam I wrote for my honors English class.
Ellie Martin
Written by
Ellie Martin
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