“What happened?” asked my family as I stormed into the house one Friday evening. School had completely exhausted me, and long story short, I was burned out.

My overwhelming fatigue and throbbing headache hindered any attempted use of intellect, and only a slur of incomprehensible “ugh” slipped from my tongue. With my utterances deteriorating to words on par with caveman language, I simply marched to my room with no desire to engage in any proper conversation.

Luckily, I could always find some solace in my familiar haven to drown out all my bottled-up frustrations. I stowed my unwieldy backpack in the corner of my room and immediately collapsed onto my bed. But really, the random twists and turns of the day just could not get any worse.

Let’s begin from the morning. To my stupor, I woke up to the growing discomfort of the ground, where I fell asleep, and the confounding blink of my alarm clock: 4:19 AM. The ungodly time flashed repeatedly before my eyes before I climbed out of my disheveled state, and the rest of the morning followed through in frantic attempts to skim textbooks and finish homework. In retrospect, I should have known that such a hapless beginning would set in motion a series of unfortunate events throughout the rest of the day.

Second-guessing myself on tests and quizzes rendered obscenely disastrous. Pop quizzes were given at the most inconvenient and unexpected of times. I was further dismayed at my forgetfulness to bring books to class and my subsequent frantic sprints across campus to fetch those vital possessions (as grateful as I am for our new junior class habitat, my locker is 5 miles too far away).

Everything was spiraling downwards, and I did not know why. Even my whispers of prayer to dissolve this blur of misfortune came to no avail.

Bad day? Yea, no kidding. Bad enough to completely taint my usual “Thank God it’s Friday” bubbly attitude.  Junior year has started for me in a flurry of tests, quizzes, and homework, and it is as laborious and tortuous as most seniors describe it. Free time is a luxury hard to obtain, and high school has suddenly become a world orbiting around numbers: the grades that eventually come to dictate between a good and bad day and the formidable GPA points or SAT scores that are placed at the forefront of our minds.

With all that is at stake, most of us are undoubtedly driven by results. Therefore, when such bad days occur, I question the existence of small-scaled justice. Life is full of unpredictable whims, and I wonder if the outcomes of unwavering effort and time devotion will fulfill or fall short of expectations. I mean, will all of this be worth it? Will all this hard work pay off?

Despite all this uncertainty, let’s face it. The fact is, no matter how we try to avoid bad days, they are thrown or hurled at us during the most spontaneous of times.

However, success in high school is not grounded on fortuitous strokes of luck no matter what we convince ourselves to believe. It expands so much more than that, and I want this school year to be different where I learn as much about American literature or AP chemistry as I learn about my failures. More specifically, learning to transform failures to success rather than waving the white flag of defeat.

Frustrations are merely inevitable challenges meant to channel constructive energy into a new day, a new beginning to start again. After all, school breaks us down to build us back up, but whether we allow our lives to rest on the latter is ultimately our own decision.