PHOTO COURTESY/ Jeffrey Van
Suffocation taught me how to be free. The start of that lesson being when the middle school nurse sent me home. Sick the next few days, I dealt with fever dreams and a mucus build-up that reduced my three methods of breathing down to one. Unable to breathe through my mouth, I was mute while my mom cried next to me.
They say that life flashes before your very eyes during a near-death experience, but when my airway became completely blocked, the exact opposite happened; life, very clearly, felt grounded in the present. In my bedridden, sore state, I jumped out of bed, sprinting to the restroom. The next oxygen-deprived minute consisted of coughing my lungs out as my life depended on it.
I had dealt with breathing issues before. My dad smoked, and so did his twenty friends that lived in his two-story townhouse. Luckily, my two brothers and I were exposed to secondhand smoke for only three days a week since we visited on the weekends. I eventually learned how to hold my breath and just ignore the smell. Besides, after the fourth grade, I never saw them again.
The summer before my freshman year, I was diagnosed with latent tuberculosis. From August until December, my Tuesday and Thursday ritual consisted of waking up early in the morning to swallow pills in front of a nurse. One Wednesday a month, I’d drive to a Monrovia clinic and take a mandatory blood test.
The diagnosis didn’t affect my first cross country season, and at the end of the school year, I asked the fastest person on the team, Alex Ortega, if I could join him on his Sunday runs. Practices became a brutal cycle of struggling to keep up, falling back and pushing forward. When my lungs protested, I would remind them that breathing was a luxury.
It paid off sophomore year when I ran the fastest 3-mile time that season (16:04), but I never ran the same after the first league meet.
One evening practice, my breathing had gone cold. I started to struggle and I could no longer keep up in following practices. Visiting the doctor later that week, I was told I would be fine in a few weeks.
Little did we know, it would last for the next two months until my coach sent me to the school nurse. It turns out that I had an upper respiratory tract infection that required antibiotics.
Even though I recovered in less than a week, my immune system still struggled. That season, the Varsity Boys qualified for CIF Prelims, a first in six years, but I couldn’t go. I was sick.
Prior to high school, I had no extracurricular to be defined by. I was a lunch table drifter that ate under the stairs before heading to the library to exclusively read from the fantasy section. At best, I’d be that book club guy. So my sudden improvement in cross country made me arrogant, cocky and a believer that running was my path to success, but being taken away from the sport taught me that I offered more than just a mile time.
In my junior year, I became the photo editor for Rampage, and in that position, I started to develop an interest in photography, Photoshop and writing. They weren’t the typical college transcript endeavor, but being rejected from English 2 Honors was the start to my less traditional high school route. I never took an AP class, I never took the SAT and I never took the time to write a college essay.
Even so, I had an art requirement to fulfill, so in a gamble, I joined Beginning Dance where I met my best friend Jason. We made up for our less than ideal dancing with top-notch production value. The class taught us the only expectations we had to fulfill were our own.
Thanks to a supportive family, I never felt pressured to sustain a 4.0, I never felt pressured to score 1600 on the SAT and I never felt pressured to run under 16. I never accomplished the former, but the latter part I did. At the second cross country race of my senior year, I ran 15:59 in the 3-mile, becoming the first TC runner in 25 years to break the 16-minute barrier.
Life is not a competitive race unless you make it one. Even then, the finish line is different for each person. Instead, I learned that life is more like a weekly training schedule: challenge yourself on hard days and rest on easy days.
Besides, the only way to perform at your best is to take care of yourself, whether that means pursuing a hobby (not related to school), spending time with loved ones or giving yourself permission to relax. Remember that every now and then, it’s okay to step back and take a breather.
Fulfilling other people’s expectations by making it into an Ivy League was never the goal anyways. Find your own happiness.