Mark+W’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

So a few days ago everything caught up to me really fast. Tyler gave his awesome speech and it hit me, oh crap what am I going to say? I am going in two days. A little bit about the past few days: Monday came and went, very unsuccessfully I might add, I got nothing done. Then Tuesday came, so I wrote two speeches during school which I ended up throwing away, and when I got home I was just trying to scheme up a way to not show up to school today, and pull a Peter. Then I got a phone call from the Blood Donor Org and I was like heck yeah I will go donate blood tomorrow and skip 4th period. In short you can’t donate before 12:30 so there went my last resort. 7:00pm came and I finally came across why I was so far behind on my speech.

1. It would be because I was anxious, and I tried to kick my issues down the road by procrastinating and run away from my issues by going to Donate Blood. And now, I am stuck donating on Friday after school!

I really think anxiety over anything shouldn’t be as big as it really is. It is a growing issue among teens, I beleive 30% or more have anxiety of some kind. And anxiety is very treatable but only ⅓ of the people get treatment for it. However, the thing I hate seeing the most is having friends or people I know self medicate by drinking or taking drugs when we are right here for them, ya know. I don’t know how many or if anyone has anxiety in here, but in the America I want to grow old in I want everyone to be less stressed and more focused.

I really have a problem with focus. I have procrastination down to an art form, I will get distracted with all the things going on be my job, school, things on my mind, my dog even, and family. Anxiety leads you to hide from your issues, push them down the road, it also can make you depressed or sleep deprived. And then looking back at everything we have done that we thought would be frightening, no longer scares us. I want our society to have a razor sharp focus, so that we can accomplish the things we fear and are anxious about. And I believe there are two types of fear being good and bad.

Good Fear is when your life is in immediate physical danger, like when a burglar is in your house, or a lion is chasing you down. This fear is good since it keeps us safe and alive, however we never get to experience this fear!

Bad Fear is when your ego is at risk of getting hurt. When you feel judged or excluded, this is the fear and anxiety I seek to eliminate from daily life. Because this fear does not help anyone at all and we all have this fear in our daily lives.

Now a stress I believe is beneficial is things like this speech for instance, school work, or physical stress be exercise and other things that benefit your life. And for the coming years I really hope AP stays as strenuous as it is now, I hope it doesn’t get any easier since I think it is great to have this challenge. However, I definitely believe we should move away from those little things that are not benefiting our lives since it seems we are addicted to the things that waste our time. There was a study on people who experienced constant stress and once that stress stopped the people actually seeked reasons to become stressed again since they were so used to it. And this blew my mind, why would you torture yourself when you have a way out.

For the future I believe we really need to help and support ourselves more. I feel like so many people don’t believe in themselves yet these same people would support maybe even die for their friends before they believed in themselves which I find myself doing as well. Why would we support our friends at all when we can’t even support ourselves at times where we need it the most. I think there is too much doubt in general. Too much worry. Not enough self belief which is what I want to see more of. I think about and wonder if we had no stress, how easy would life be at that point, how much more approachable would the things we want to have or do would be. Imagine how easy life would be without any stress.

This is the America I want to live in, a less stressed and focused society.