Learn from your friends’ mistakes

Recently, I started the last term of my high school year. As a Gashora girl, I had a lot on the plate. I had to do the standardized tests, write essays, finalize projects and keep up my academics. Everyone else seemed to have completed at least one of the above, yet I had not started working on any of them. Logically, I had to work twice as hard as everyone else to catch up on everything.

In order to make it work, I had to call on a Greater Power. I couldn’t rely on alarms, they tend to wake you up in a fitful dream. As a Christian, my refuge was God. So, every night before I slept, I would say this prayer: Dear Lord, I know that you are Almighty and that Your mercy has no ends. Please turn your gracious gaze towards my existence and help me wake up early. This worked a hundred per cent. I would wake up at three in the morning, and I wouldn’t sleep again until midnight. This felt cool, I could do so many things. One morning, I finished a 150 pages chemistry booklet in just one morning.

I guess God is just like any other parent. When you ask them for something, they will almost always give it to you- even when it is bad. They want you to realize how destructive it could be by yourself. So I continued doing this for a week- from Friday to Thursday. I would try to find time to sleep during the day, but I always ended up doing something different. So what went wrong?

On Thursday, I had decided to change tactics, and instead of sleeping at midnight, I would sleep at four am and wake up at seven in the morning. Every moment had been planned for. I would do a full length ACT test from 7:30 pm to 11:00 pm, then I would revise math from 11:15 to 1:30 am, and finally complete my college essays up to four.

Things did not go according to my plans, it turned out, we had a math class from 7:00pm to 8:00 pm. At around 7:30, my head started burning. I blamed this to the lack of water, and went to drink some. It did not help at all. Twenty minutes later, things started heating up, tears welling in my eyes, I run to cool down my face. I came back to class determined to try and finish the class before going to sleep.

I didn’t last five minutes, I felt like I had a furnace in my head. I run straight to bed. Now I couldn’t control my tears, it was just like a dam that had been broken. My whole body was burning, and I couldn’t truly sleep. I could not have made it if not for Amina and Delice who poured cold water on my head until it had cooled down to normal. Later on, everyone was concerned and they tried to help me make it through.

As I write this, I wonder what I was fighting for. I wonder why I was compromising my entire existence for something so small. For everyone out there, do try to get seven hours of sleep every day. You never know when your brain will burn down and it is not guaranteed that you will get as much support as I had. Please don’t just be smart, be wise; because a smart person learns from their mistakes, while a wise one learns from other people’s mistakes.