After a seven-hour day of school, all I want to do was go home to sleep or watch some TV on Friday afternoons. But my freshman year, instead of resting I would go straight to track practice, and after three hours I’d go straight to two hours of soccer practice until around 9 p.m. And on Saturday mornings when all I wanted to do was relax a little, I would leave at 5 a.m. for a volleyball tournament. My days were always busy, but at the time I didn’t care one bit.

Freshman year I think that’s what most people do: We all stacked up as many extracurriculars and sports as we could. Maybe just to pad our college applications, but also maybe to dip our feet into each pool all these activities represented. There’s no harm in trying new things. But as high school goes on, the workload increases and free time decreases. We’re forced to make sacrifices and give up some activities in order to commit to others.

I could not be happier with how my freshman year turned out. Despite the bumps in the road that came with adjusting to a new school, my experience was fairly normal. I tried all sorts of activities, from volleyball to speech and debate to taking an animation class in school, and eventually I found my niche.

As I end my second semester of senior year, one of the regrets I do have from high school is quitting volleyball. At the end of freshman year, when the going got tough, I thought I had to choose between soccer and volleyball. Without doing much research, I didn’t even try out for volleyball my sophomore year and committed to soccer instead.

A couple weeks into the fall season, I realized that club soccer practices would have fallen at different times than volleyball practices and I could have played both after all. I only quit volleyball over soccer because I had been playing soccer longer and thought it would look better on my college applications, a decision I now realize was shallow. Who knows, had I continued to play volleyball for even another week maybe I would have chosen to play that instead of soccer.

My experience with volleyball made me cherish everything in high school much more. I don’t quit activities right away. I’m not trying to stack my schedule up with extracurriculars just to build a good resume either. But I do try to take on as much as I possibly can without overloading myself, and only with activities I actually enjoy because now I just want to take full advantage of all the opportunities presented to us in high school.

I think that is one of the main things people should realize in high school. It is OK to overload yourself with activities and try different pursuits because your friends are doing them freshman year. That’s the way to start to grow. Freshman year, I was too scared to play on the Powderpuff team, or run for elections, or even participate in Homecoming. But I observed some of my friends participate in all these activities and I think they are the ones who truly did enjoy their high school experience because they lived it from start to end.

Embarrassing yourself is just a part of high school, and is a part of developing your character and learning from your mistakes. Getting good grades and being a good students are of course a part of high school too, but shouldn’t consume students.

So if I could, I would go back and dance in a freshman year Homecoming dance. And sophomore year, I would keep playing volleyball and run for student government elections. Junior year I would take more breaks from studying every once in a while to hang out with my friends.

But by senior year, I think everything finally comes together. We all finally have some time to do the things we always wished we could. We can finally make and cross items off bucket lists, and hopefully by the end we all have no regrets going into college with a fresh start.