67. High School RECAP

Jul 2

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TRIGGER WARNING for suicidal ideation.

This solo episode is all about my high school experience (3 states, 3 schools, treatment—it was a wild ride folks). I dive into pre-treatment, during residential/therapeutic boarding school stays, and moving home as well as navigating COVID. I also answer loads of listener questions about navigating high school! Enjoy!!

This week's DBT Skill is the ABC Skill. Learn more here!

Mentioned In The Episode…

+ Ep. 55 Mental Health Advice for High School Students

+ 3East McLean Hospital (DBT Residential Program)

+ Ep 39. Your Foolpororf Guide to a Good Night's Sleep

Episode Sponsor

🛋This week's episode is sponsored by Teen Counseling. Teen Counseling is an online therapy program with over 14,000 licensed therapists in their network offering support with depression, anxiety, relationships, trauma, and more via text, talk, and video counseling. Head to teencounseling.com/shepersisted to find a therapist today!

About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)

After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.

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a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental mispellings!

Welcome to she persisted. I'm your host Sadie Sutton. Every Friday, I post interviews about mental health dialectical behavioral therapy and teenage life. These episodes break down my mental health journey, teach skills to help you cope with life and showcase testimonials from individuals, including teens, just like you.

Whether you've struggled yourself or just want to improve your mental fitness. This podcast is your inspiration to live a life you love and keep persisting

This week on she persisted.

It's being able to look back on your high school experience and say, I'm proud of that. Like I did that. I feel happy with everything I built here, whether it's Your relationships, how you grown as a person, as a student, the skills you've gathered along the way, the lessons you've learned.

That's what makes high school successful is for you to look back and be proud of what you've done. It's not your grades, your GPA. It's none of that.

This week's DBT skill is the ABC scale. This is an acronym that stands for accumulate positives, build mastery and cope ahead. I'm going to break this down super quickly, but I'll link more information in today's show notes.

So accumulate positives, intentionally planning, moments of joy, whether it's waking up and drinking your favorite cup of coffee. Having lunch with a friend, watching a movie or a TV show, right. The key is to plan these things in advance and the impact that it has on your emotion regulation is that when we experience these lows in our emotions, when we experience these down moods, you no longer jump into that.

Headspace of I have nothing going for me, everything sucks because you've intentionally accumulated these positives within your life. Next letter, building mastery, again, pretty simple building mastery over a skill, whether it's a sport and activity podcasts. Improving your ability and competency in an activity, it increases your sense of pride. It increases your sense of purpose and, and capability, and it really boosts your self esteem. Also gives you a great outlet to express your emotions. It brings you a sense of purpose energizes you. Another great way to regulate emotions. And the last letter cope ahead.

This is intentionally planning for an event that might cause a distressing emotion. So say you're coping ahead for the first day of school this next year. You're going to walk through mentally. Who, what, when, where, why, how all of the details, what emotions might arise, worst case scenario, what you're going to do if these different things happen so that when you get to that situation, you're not bombarded by all of these things that you weren't prepared for.

You are emotionally ready to cope and dive into the situation. Be your best self. So that's the ABC scale, super versatile, anyone, and everyone can use the scale. And it's one of my favorites.

Hello. We are back. I know I said I was back in the broadcast grind. It's been another week, but we're here.

We are ready to go and I have so much good stuff in store for you guys. I'm feeling so motivated and it just a huge sense of purpose with the podcast and all the episodes that are going to come out and upleveling this content and making a better for all of you guys. So I'm just super, super excited for what's to come on the podcast.

Things that have been happening in my life. Really, really trying to get back on top of my sleep, got on a really bad sleep schedule. And if you are familiar with my story or my philosophies around mental health, you know, that I prioritize sleep so much. I think it's so connected to your vulnerability in your emotion regulation, and your ability to tolerate distress and build your relationships like it's all interconnected.

And when we. Sleeping. Well, all of those things suffer and so really got to get back on that sleep. What I'm doing this week. If you're also looking for tips and tricks to improve your sleep. An electronic shut off at 11:00 PM. You can do whatever time works for you based on your kind of sleeper teen. And not just that we're leaving the electronics downstairs.

There's no temptation of like waking up and scrolling on Tik TOK or watching TV. And I was with my therapist this week. And she was like, say like, is this really gonna work? Like, are you just going to put the electronics downstairs?

And I was like, no. So we've deleted all of my streaming apps. There's no Hulu. There's no Netflix. There's no HBO. Max. There's no YouTube. They're all gone. And it's honestly, Feeling good. Just to kind of have that detox. And at the same time, my sleep is still struggling. I think my body is still on a weird schedule because I have been reading an entire book before I go to bed.

And it's not like a hefty book. Right. But I'm like reading through an entire romance novel for four hours, four to five hours before I can fall asleep. It's terrible. So updates next week. Really trying everything and anything to improve my sleep routine, because this is not sustainable. This is not the goal of not trying to be super reading every single night.

It's a bit of a disaster, but that's where I'm at right now. So I tangent on the therapy thing. I was talking to someone today and she was talking about how she used to be in therapy, but she's moved on from that point in her life now. And I was wondering, I want you guys to know.

Is therapy, something that you like move on from, is that the goal to like, not be getting any kind of like professional support? Because I don't, like, I'm not saying I disagree or agree, but I don't think therapy is like a positive or a negative impact on your mental health. Like maybe you function perfectly well without therapy.

Great. Love it. Maybe you maybe you function at your best when you're seeing a therapist every week, two weeks, three weeks, whatever your schedule is, and that's how you function best. You don't have to feel like you're working towards never working with someone because maybe that's what helps you feel the best and have someone to check in with.

And like, I also think there's a lot of misconceptions about what therapy necessarily means. I know for me, it shifted so much. I would initially go into therapy sessions and be sobbing and we would do be doing like deep chain analyses. Which I talked about that scale before, but like deep diving into why engage in a certain behavior or blow up that I had with my parents or like coming out of the hospital, like what went wrong with that?

Like, that was what I was doing in therapy, sobbing emotions, overwhelming would leave therapy and be like, once my next session, like I need this lifeline and I'm going to therapy and yes, I'm still working through some emotions and all these kinds of different things and things that I've come through, but it's also like, how am I going to advocate for this thanked for my parents or an adult in my life? How am I going to plan to be successful in college? Get that sleep back on track, have a routine that works for me, eat healthier, exercise more like all of these habits that I'm building or checking in about a relationship like.

I don't know. I think that's such an amazing resource and we discount that that can be what therapy is for you. Like if you don't have a great adult in your life, that you can get honest insight on and education on how to be more effective in your relationships or at school or with your sleep, like having a therapist or a counselor, someone to talk to about that could be a huge resource.

And it doesn't mean that you're going in and getting a diagnosis or medicated or anything every week. Like, I don't know, stereotypes. That was the tangent. So many questions are, let me know your thoughts of what therapy looks like for you. If you want it to look different or you're happy with how it looks for you now.

And if there be, if the goal for therapy is to just graduate and be done with that. Confused. Okay. Off of that whole tangent. But yeah. Now we're going to dive into the actual main part of this episode, which is high school. I graduated high school. Gosh, now it's almost like over a month ago. I really meant to do this episode, like the week after I graduated and it just hasn't happened, but we've had time to reflect.

And while I have done a mental health tips for high school, Students episode, which I'll link in today's show notes. I really just wanted to do a recap, a reflection, regroup on what happened anyways. It didn't really feel right just to jump into all of these other amazing episodes. Start transitioning to college without truly doing like a recap episode on high school. Because again, so much of my mental health struggles occurred during high school occurred during my freshman.

My whole treatment experience was during my time in high school. And so it was really important to me to dive into this episode, make this a resource for anyone who had any questions about navigating your mental health and high school.

And what that was like for me, little Storytime moment, if you will. Okay. So first thing we're going to talk about is kind of just go through the timeline. Right? So started freshman year, really still struggling with depression, anxiety, all of these different things in and out of treatment, whether it was being in the hospital, doing outpatient, partial hospitalization, group therapy, family therapy, all of the things were happening. As I was just trying to transition to high school.

I felt really lonely. I felt like I didn't fit in with my community at that school. I really just didn't have a group of peers that I identified with. I didn't have a close group of friends. I was super, super isolated and so I was isolated for a couple of reasons. And the first reason I would say was really because when we're depressed, we have the urge to withdraw and, and sit in those feelings and not engage in these things. We lose interest in our different activities that we're doing. So that was something that was very, very prevalent.

And as I started experiencing what I was going through, I felt so isolated my emotions and that other people wouldn't understand that I did pull back from my friendships and my family relationships and all of those different. I ended up taking a medical leave of absence during the second semester of my freshman year and did residential for four months at three east McLean hospital.

And that's when things really changed. I went from being severely suicidally depressed. Every single aspect of my life, whether it was getting up, having a relationship not feeling depressed 24 7 to coming out on the other end, not waking up every single day, depressed, not struggling with suicidal ideation, just monumentally huge shifts in my mood and my emotions in my relationships.

And that was due to a lot of work with DBT skills, education working in relationship with my parents, really understanding what was going on inside my head, like when I was experiencing anxiety, that that thought was the emotions were valid, but the fear wasn't justified. And so I could let that thought kind of go, instead of following it down a spiral and making myself more anxious, so tons and tons and tons of work like that group therapy, family therapy, all of the things while I lived there for four months and my sophomore year, I went to a therapeutic boarding school in Montana, continued to maintain that progress. Because again, I'd done such a 180. I went from being severely depressed, severely struggling to kind of being okay for the first time in years. And so to just immediately go back to the original environment when I hadn't had a long time to kind of sustain that relationship with my parents maintain these new habits, I was building like having a good sleep schedule, having a good diet, getting outside.

Building friendships. It could have like, I very well could have relapsed into those feelings of depression and anxiety and all of those different things. So continue to maintain that progress. I made up a lot of different school credits so that I was on track. Why was that the therapeutic boarding school?

And then we, we came back home and I went to the local public school for my junior year. And that was good. I think the first semester I was so overwhelmed by the transition, I would say, especially academically. That it was taking everything in me to just kind of stay on top of that, the concept of making new friends and truly building a community at that school.

Wasn't something that came until my senior year because COVID hit right in the middle of my junior year. So again, more things going crazy. We were all at home. We were in lockdown. I didn't even really have. Any zoom school during my junior year, they just had us do assignments. And then senior year we did due to zoom school.

We did go back in person at the end. We graduated and I have built a really great community and group of friends. I enjoyed my classes. Hm. Yeah. All of the things kind of worked out things really shifted. I went into high school, severely struggling, barely making it through the day.

Every day, everything was draining and overwhelming. And then coming out the other end of high school, really having what would be like a normal high school experience and no longer having my life consumed by that all these emotions and things that I was, I was juggling at the time.

So a couple of other things I just wanted to touch on before I dive into all the questions that you guys asked. The first being that high school is really not the end all be all. Like I said, I didn't do the second semester of my freshman year still got into college. I definitely got a very bad grade in my calculus class, senior spring, still going to college that I know of.

And so. While it does seem like everything is like life or death. Your future is dependent on this grade, in this AP class or this test that's coming up or this quiz, I promise it's not, you have time to recover. You have time do adapter. You have so much to look forward to. And so much in front of you.

Time-wise with college. If that's the path you choose. If with life, you have decades to figure this all out. And it's, it's not as significant as you think, and I'm not trying to make that invalidating, but you can, you can take a little bit of stress off of yourself. You can say, Hey, okay, like this quiz, isn't going to be life or death.

It's not going to dictate my entire future because I have decades of life left to live and things will change. People are understanding all of these things. So that's the first thing, but does that. So many of these things that bring us so much stress in high school are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

And you, you can allow yourself to focus on moments that bring you joy and happiness and purpose and have what is a quote unquote successful high school experience. And I wrote that down in my notes before I was doing this episode. What I mean by that is not getting into a certain school or having a certain grades when you graduate or a certain GPA or having a certain number of extracurriculars.

That's what makes high school successful is for you to look back and be proud of what you've done. It's not your grades, your GPA. It's none of that. And then the last thing you mentioned before, your questions is that if you are struggling with your mental health and high school, there is no better time than now to do a deep dive into that.

You are in a very unique point in your life where you're not locked into your career. You're not completely financially independent. You are not navigating. College or graduate school, whatever these things are, whatever the next steps that you're going to take that make it very difficult to uproot your life.

They haven't happened yet. So you are able to like me do residential or a therapeutic boarding school and still have a normal high school experience. Continue on the path that you want to, and a much better head space, better equipped to navigate the world and adulthood and all of these things.

So if you are even thinking like, should I go into therapy? Like I'm worried this will add a lot to my plate, or should I ask my parents about. Getting support or treatment, whatever it is. Yes. 110%. Yes. Because you are at such a unique time in your life where you can do that. And there's not a ton of consequences.

Like, like I said, didn't do the second semester, freshman year, I made up the credit. Whenever I was in the hospital, I would come back to school and I couldn't make up the work. Like, like high school is there to support you. They're there to help you navigate these things. And you're not locked in on a certain path yet.

So you can totally 100% get that support, do the work now. And you were adult self will be so thankful that you have the ability to cope and be persistent and overcome challenges. And these are skills that a lot of adults don't learn for a long time. So that is my last thing.

teen counseling. I can not tell you guys how many DMS texts emails I get from teens, parents, even friends asking, how can I find a therapist? How can I enroll in therapy? How can I find a therapist for my team? How do I tell my parents? I want to go to therapy.

That's why I'm partnering with teen counseling. Teen counseling is an online therapy program with over 14,000 licensed therapists in their network. They offer support on things like depression, anxiety, relationships, trauma, and more. And it's all targeted at teens. They offer text talk and video counseling.

So no matter what level of support you're looking for, they got you. You're going to go to teen counseling.com, she persisted. You'll fill out a quick survey about what your goals are for therapy, whether that's improving your mental health during the pandemic. Working on your relationship with your parents, improving self esteem, whatever it is, they'll match you with therapists that fits your needs.

You'll enter your information and your parents' information. Your parents will get a super discreet email saying your child's interested in working with a licensed therapist teencounseling.com They had to the website learn a little bit more about the program and a preview to work with a therapist.

And from there you can meet with that therapist on a frequency that works for you. This is a great way to dip your toe into the therapy world and get support when you need it. Without having to go into an office, meet with the therapist, meet with this stranger and go through all of that for the first time.

So you can go to teen counseling.com, she persisted. Again, that's teencounseling.com/she persisted to get started today.

So questions that you guys asked the first question was how to know which clubs to join and how to find your interests. Literally explore them all. You're going to go to the clubs fair. You're going to look at average single table. Yes. Like you can walk around with your friends, see what they're doing, because honestly, if you have someone to sit without a club, I feel like you get a lot more out of it than if you're just like sitting by yourself, eating your own.

Awkward wondering if everyone's looking at you, like have a wing woman, a wing man, like whatever it is, go walk around all the clubs, tables, see anything and everything that piques your interest, add your email to their email list. Maybe there's going to be an opportunity that you want to join, but you don't necessarily want to commit to the club.

Here's the other thing, you can also sign up for a lot of clubs and then end up committing to like two or three or however many you want to. I'm not saying sign up for 12 clubs, put those on your resume.

That's not the advice here. I'm saying sign up for a lot of clubs, go to one or two meetings. See which ones you really enjoy and are passionate about. And then from there, you figure out where your interests lie, which ones you want to be more involved in which ones you want to put more hours into, maybe take on a leadership role.

So really just trial and error. Try everything. Be curious, add your name to the email list, keep an eye out for what events they're putting on all of those things. Also, if there's any opportunities where they're like, we need volunteers to like hand out flyers or put things up, like, yeah, like that's not going to take a lot of your time.

You might meet someone new, you might get involved in something that you ended up really enjoying. So do it say yes.

The next one is how to stay out of sticky situations with the freshmen sticky situations. I feel I can go so many different ways. I would say going into high school really worked to have a good support system that is outside of your school or that is diversified among your social circles.

So if you have a great adult that you can rely on in your life, if you have a close relationship with a parent, if you have a friend that you're not necessarily in the same social group, you get along with really well, you grab coffee all the time. Those people are the ones that you can keep yourself in check with.

You can ask them, you can bounce ideas off of, and you're like, I'm really not sure, like what's going on in this situation. What do you think? And then they'll give their insight and you're able to totally check yourself, get insight without worrying about being rejected or judged by this other social group that might be involved in this quote, unquote sticky.

So my advice there is to have a support network of wise like-minded individuals who share your values and you can lean on, check in with and, and ask them questions to kind of check yourself on what you're doing, what you're involved in and what they think about. Next one is balancing having a job and schoolwork.

For this one, I would definitely put it on a calendar and not everyone works this way. I totally get it. I'm sure you can take different like ideas from this concept and then apply it to your situation. But what I would do is map out all of your commitments for school and for your job.

So say that you have school five days a week. You're working two to three days a week. Mark your shifts on your calendar. Marcus cool hours, mark. When your clubs are meeting mark, when your sports are happening, all of that kind of stuff. And then. And you're going to see, where do I have room to do schoolwork?

Maybe it's after dinner, maybe it's before dinner. Maybe I can actually squeeze it in during this free period or on the weekends. And you're really going to have to optimize your time. Well, and you want to balance being engaged and active in school while also having a job it's really, really important to have good time management because you don't really have the luxury of spending 12 hours a day on tech talk. Like there's not enough hours in the day and your mental health will struggle if you're not giving yourself time to relax and rest. So I would say schedule everything out.

See when you have time to do schoolwork and really optimize your time so that you're not spending every free moment doing schoolwork and make sure that you're prioritizing yourself care your time to rest your sleep schedules, that you have enough energy and motivation to put into these different commitments.

And I did get another question, which was tips for bouncing slash prioritizing extracurricular sports, passion projects, club, et cetera. I would do the calendar thing and making sure that you're getting enough rest and relaxation that you can still engage in these actions. If you find that you're feeling stress in your mental health is struggling, then we get into prioritizing.

And from there I'd really go for what makes you feel the happiest brings you the most joy, this, this a sense of purpose, because those are the things that will give you the most longevity. Maybe you feel like having this club on your list will help you get into college, but you absolutely hate it.

Your ability to put time into that activity and not feel mentally drained is going to be very minimal. But you have this club that you could work on outside of school for hours at a time. I honestly think there's a better investment because you'll be able to show your college how deeply passionate you are about this thing, how much time you've put into it, these skills you've been able to, to gain these people you worked with to pull off this project. And I think that's much more powerful than checking a box and being on the roster for a club. So I would say, figure out which ones energize you the most, bringing you the most joy, make you happy, and then organize your schedule around that.

You're going to optimize to go to those events. Commitments. And then if you have the mental bandwidth to go to the other clubs, the other commitments, you're going to do that, but you're going to take things off your plate that are truly draining your energy and taking a toll on your mental health. And the same thing goes for relationships too.

If you're spending three hours a week on the phone with a friend who's constantly like seeming in crisis, and it's really impacting your mental health, take that out of your schedule. You're like, I'm sorry. I'm really stressed. I'm studying for a task. Like I can't do this and you're slowly going to start to distance yourself or you're going to be straight up and be like, Hey, like, I'm really sorry. Like I'm here to support you as a friend and for my own mental health, I can't be spending three hours a night on the phone with you every single week. Like that. It just, it isn't working for my mental health. So if you want to go grab a coffee next week and check in, or if you want to watch a TV show together and talk about it and use that as a distraction from what you're going through, I'm happy to do that.

I'm here for you. And for my own mental health, I'm going to need to take a step back to take that out of your schedule, to things that are making your mental health struggle. You're going to deprioritize those. And if it's schoolwork, if it's things that have to be done, don't deprioritize those, bounce them with self-care with things that you love, mix some other distractions in there.

But when it's things you can afford to lose, take them off the to-do list. If they're really truly making a struggle. I got eight tips for maintaining your sleep schedule. I did talk about doing little TV technology detox in this intro. So that's one tip the other things I'm going to do in rapid fire and link a whole episode on my sleep hygiene tips in the show notes.

The first thing is to be really consistent. You want to be going to bed and getting up at around the same time every single day, even on the weekends. So maybe you're going to bed at 11, waking up at eight. You're going to stick to that. You're going to avoid screens like an hour before bed. You're going to read before bed.

If you like doing that. If not, you're going to maybe do a little meditation moment. You're going to avoid eating or exercising like an hour before bed. If you find yourself laying in bed and you're like hungry, go eat an apple, go drink some tea, something like that. But avoiding caffeine, avoiding really sugary carby foods right before you go to bed, because that'll also give you more energy and make it more difficult to go to sleep.

You're going to try and get outside and get exercise throughout the day so that your circadian rhythms can actually see the sun and be like, okay, it's daytime. So we're awake now. And we're going to go to sleep tonight. Exercise will also help make you more tired at night so that you can fall asleep.

I feel like that's most of the things that are helpful to mention, if you're finding yourself laying in bed for like four hours staring at the ceiling and can't fall asleep, you're going to get up. You're going to go sit in a chair. You're going to sit on the floor. You're going to get out of your bed.

You're going to read a book in low light. That's not emotionally engaging. You're going to listen to a sleep meditation. You're going to do some deep breathing until you start to feel drowsy and. Back to bed rather than just staying in the same environment, because you're working to maintain your bed with when you're sleeping.

So on that note also do nothing in your room or in your bed other than sleep. And your body will start to associate it with sleeping. It'll start to wind down, feel drowsy, feel tired when you go to your room. And I promise that helps so much so hope that was helpful. I'll link the other episode down below.

How did you keep a healthy balance between your work life and your social life? I feel like this was honestly way easier during COVID because you couldn't really socialize that much anyways, but I feel like figuring out what the priorities are for you. If you are really passionate about your work or that's important to you, you want to keep your job, you're going to prioritize your chefs and you're going to set boundaries with your friends.

If for you, it's more important to prioritize your social life. Then you will work your work schedule around your social life and your advocates, your boss, and be like, Hey, I really can't work Saturday nights until 11:00 PM.

And instead you focus on these friendships because these friendships build you up, they help you improve your mental health. So, yeah, I would say setting boundaries on whichever one you feel like is taking energy from you and draining you and isn't a priority.

And not running yourself ragged with either of them. If you find yourself working like multiple shifts and then going to hang out with friends until some crazy late hours and then getting up for school the next morning, just to try and balance everything, like stop that, like stop that, like there.

Yes, you want to have these relationships. You want to build these relationships. You also want to have the job and you also want to be working at school, but there's a way to more effectively balance those and make your interactions more meaningful and optimize your time at school to do more homework.

So that's my tip for that is really optimizing your time within all those three. So you don't burn yourself out.

What classes do you wish you didn't take? AP chem was so, so, so freaking difficult. Calculus was also really hard and I'll give myself some grace there because it was completely virtual and it was difficult to stay motivated with COVID and difficult to understand lessons. However, I encourage you to choose classes that you enjoy and that you're passionate about.

And not just because you see your friends taking them, or you feel like it's the right thing to do for college, you can go above and beyond and have a great grade and show this amazing passion project that you've done on a class rather than taking on three extra APS. I really do truly feel like that's more powerful.

So I wish that I did. In general take classes that I felt I needed to take for college, or it was the right thing to do. And instead lean into classes that I really felt passionate about and that piqued my interest and kept me motivated and interested and wanting to come to every single class and learn or about the topic.

What are your three biggest pieces of advice for incoming freshmen? Okay. I'll really try and keep this to three. The first thing is what I said earlier about saying yes to everything.

Go and look at every single club. Look at all the posters, read all the emails, talk to all the teachers. Read the descriptions for all the sports, right. Put yourself out there. You don't know what you're going to like. And at least being curious about all these opportunities will serve you in the long run.

You don't have to commit to doing 12 sports and 18 clubs, but at least get curious about seven different activities at your school, and then commit to. The next thing is to really put yourself out there, say hi, go up to someone, say hello. I don't know when the shift took place, but I went from someone who would like never say hi, or go out or do something that would possibly be embarrassing in a social environment to now, whatever.

I like meet something in a public area. I'm like, Hey, can you like, do you know where this thing is? Or I'm sorry, do you know what time it is? Like no one cares. Everyone is thinking so much more about themselves and what people are thinking of them than possibly judging you.

So go up to people, say hi to them. If you think you might get along, ask them if they want to hang out, ask them for help, studying for something or complain about a class that you're both in, put yourself out there socially. And you might just find your Greek group of friends.

And if you don't, you never have to talk to them again. They're not going to remember and I promise it'll be okay. And then the last thing is to ask questions. No one knows how to study perfectly. No one knows what the right way to do the homework. No one knows exactly what a teacher is going to be looking for on an assignment.

So ask them, ask your friends what they're doing. Ask the teacher, what they suggest to study, ask the guidance counselor. How can I navigate this? I'm really stressed out this week. They'll help you advocate for an extension. Ask questions because you're not supposed to know everything and it's okay to ask for support.

And I didn't really match up to anything on mental health there. Of course that's important, but I also like feel like, and I know I didn't say anything mental health related on there, but I feel like all of those things being engaged in activities, having a good social group and leading our support system, those all lead to great mental health.

And we talked a lot about other different treatment things in this episode. So I feel like. Last two questions. One is what extracurriculars did you have? I did a couple of things in high school. It, I was at again, three different schools. So freshman year I did cross country. I didn't compete because it was ended out of the hospital, but I didn't do the practices.

I was in the TEDx club. I was in feminism club and I was in sports medicine club. Sophomore year, I was at my therapeutic boarding school and I started it. And worked on their community service club. And I was also in student government there and then junior and senior year, I was in broadcasting club women in stem club, which I only did for one year.

Red cross club. Trying to think if I'm forgetting any thing, tried out for cheerleading, didn't end up going through that because scheduling wise and because of COVID and the podcast, and that's not really like a school extracurricular, but that was what I was spending all my free time doing. Last question is, are you bringing the dogs to college?

I wish I really freaking wish. Can you imagine if I could have like them there as emotional support animals, like in the dorm and at all my classes? No, sadly I'm not. They're staying in California and I honestly don't know if I'll be able to see them before Christmas, because I think we're traveling over Thanksgiving and we're not going to be at home.

But I will miss them so much and I will get, I'm sure sent tons of fun photos and videos, which I'll share with you guys on Instagram as well. And yeah, sad answer is no, I'm not bringing them to college, but I'm going to miss them so much and it's going to be so sad. Okay. So that is the episode. that was my high school recap.

And really just like cliff notes is that things don't matter as much as they think you think they will try everything. Be curious. Be social, all of the things and it will all be. So, yeah, with that being said, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of she persisted. Be sure to leave a review on apple podcasts.

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