Courage
What is courage? To some people, it is looking over and speaking to a sea of four hundred familiar faces. To others, it is smiling and greeting a person whom they have never met. Still more people would define courage as looking down from the top of a high building without that dizzy feeling, or stepping onto a loop-de-loop roller coaster for the first time. However, all these things I can do without so much as a stammer in my speech or a catch in my breath. Only recently did I find a courage that was real for me. I suspect that I am a very difficult person to understand. I experience, and perhaps suffer from, a drive that to most people seems illogical and unreasonable. I want to do it all, and perhaps the problem with that is that I can't accept anything as being done well enough unless I have done it perfectly. In my mind, "good" isn't good enough, I feel I need to be "excellent" and "extraordinary." I want to grab all I can from life, fill my arms with every kind of experience, but I can't accept dropping anything. I want to do it all and excel at it all. I guess you could say I want to have my cake and eat it too. Why? Well, that is another, much longer, paper entirely. So, what does this have to do with courage, anyway?
The Wednesday before Arts Day, things came to their absolute peak. On top of all the stress, a pain, which ailed me physically and emotionally, refused to succumb to medication. I couldn't take it anymore. I came to school that morning and simply lay down in the hallway in front of my locker. I didn't move until I absolutely had to, and then there was no skip in my step or lift in my cheeks. Friends told me I looked as if I was about to keel over dead. With all the stress, I simply didn't have the energy to fight a physical pain, and my last bit of bite and resistance was pressed out of me. All morning long, I just wanted to lay down and cry. My point is this: even though that seems like such a simple and uneventful thing to most people, it was one of the most difficult things I've done in my life. I'd done something truly courageous. Courage, for me, was deciding that, for an afternoon, I didn't have to be perfect. I allowed myself to fail for a little while, rest, and pick up my burden later. When I had the courage to admit that I couldn't be perfect, I released an incredible amount of self-inflicted pressure. It's something I have to learn to keep in mind. What happened when I got home was rather uneventful. An afternoon for myself was all I needed. And the world survived without me. Well, my junior year has been a very difficult one for me, as it is for many high school students. I feel overwhelmed with projects, extracurricular activities, and a social life on top of that. I
Some common words found in the essay are:
Arts Day, , arts day, truly courageous, can't accept, suspect difficult,
Approximate Word count = 1009
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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