“If you could give any piece of advice to your sixteen-year-old self, what would it be?”

“I would tell myself that the way that I really feel is right, that it only matters what goes on within yourself, and that if you just focus on what’s right for you, you’ll be on the right track.”

“Are there any times when you wish you had known that advice?”

“I think I was so focused on this idea of what I wanted to do professionally and the sort of path that I would have to take to please my parents and fulfill these expectations. I don’t think I followed that advice because I didn’t really do what I was enjoying in school. When you’re in high school you’re so young and you don’t really know what you want to do. I spent so much time stressing over my inability to perform to what I thought was my utmost capacity in math, when it turns out I really just couldn’t do it. Instead, I should have focused on what I was really good at, which is writing and history, which I never really allowed myself to focus on because I thought I was going into the sciences, based on the expectations at the time.”

Category: People