Burnout sucks.

I, unfortunately, have become quite personally familiar with it. Over the years, pushing myself to earn no less than a B became praying my mother would stop asking to check my grades and just scraping by for a C. It stings when I used to be told by everyone I knew how I was incredibly intelligent.

I told myself that I’d go out, ace every test, and never settle for second best — I’d stay up every night since freshman year, getting homework done. I knew I was overzealous, but I wanted to shine like a star.

I wanted to leave a legacy.

Because my biggest fear is failing to get the ribbon, or A, or award — I wondered what love could be given and what my mother would think of her son if I didn’t achieve that. Slowly, I began to drain beneath the pressures of what was expected of me, and I ran myself steadily into the ground. It was the middle of my sophomore year when I realized I was burning out.

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress, typically resulting from unmanaged workplace pressures.

The school is a student’s workplace.

Long nights spent awake studying turned into evenings spent lying on my mattress staring at the ceiling, unmotivated to do anything, figuring I’d leave my work for the next day.

Precrastination turned into the generational struggle I’ve seen my friends have: procrastination.

The realization shifted my perspective of how I viewed myself, and the negative mindset I’d acknowledged in the mindmap I drew during my freshman Learning How to Learn Class — “Be Great or Be Nothing” — was starting to make me think that I really was nothing.

Burnout is protean. It shifts and changes for everyone, and manifests itself in different ways. My burnout was creeping through the back window while my focus was on fortifying the door. Before I realized it, I became trapped in my own body alongside it.

As this 2026 school year comes to a close, it only feels like I’m losing momentum — like the ground is pulling me down. I could give up on the dream of perfection, but I have this clock above my head that tells me my fate is losing its patience, and if I were to give up on perfection to try to rid myself of burnout, I wouldn’t know how to function.

The academic culture in schools is often one of toxic conditioning. Though La Salle does try to alleviate the pressure students feel, it is by default more intense at the college prep level, as students are held to higher standards. We’ve been trained to think that a C+ is equivalent to an F, or are even shedding tears over a B, when in reality, those grades are far from failing.

But many teenagers are balancing so much more than just the average workload.

Like many other students, I find that the stressors outside the classroom — whether it’s a complicated family dynamic, mental health, or the quiet chaos of a house that never quite rests — make the hunt for an A feel impossible — especially when the desperate need for a future outside of what exists in the present weighs heavily at the forefront of my mind.

When it comes to overcoming burnout, it helps to look for small ways to feel like a person again rather than a performance. It can be something as simple as doing things that you enjoy like drawing or reading.

For me, it’s the small joys of drawing, writing stories, and drinking a bottle of strawberry milk. They’re classic, and I find comfort in the simplicity. It’s a trivial thing that was once mocked by people who didn’t understand it, but now it’s mine. Other strategies that I’ve seen the people around me use include crocheting, going for a run, painting nails, and simply sleeping.

Even though I also find it hard to remember, it’s good to try and internalize the fact that you are not just your grades.

You, me, and everyone else.