Pushing Myself Too Hard

I’m irresponsible. At least, that was true in the eyes of my teacher. The assignment was to read up to chapter five, nothing more. But, like every night before, I had somehow managed to read too far ahead.

Normally it wasn’t a problem, getting too engrossed in the story, loving every detail and moment of the fantasy lives the characters lived, and forgetting to stop reading. However, during this particular in-class discussion, I slipped up and spoiled The City of Ember for my class. I’d failed to give a “spoiler alert” before blurting out that the main characters eventually managed to escape their boring, laborious lives underground. My fifth grade teacher stared at me, mystified, and asked, “Why can’t you ever just stop where you’re supposed to?”

The reality is that I tend to go past “chapter five” in other areas of my life too.

When I first picked up the viola in fourth grade, I had no idea what role it would play in my life. My friends were all choosing either the violin or cello, so I figured I’d try that lonely instrument in the middle. By the end of eleventh grade, I was playing in four ensembles, including a quartet with my friends that played everything from Mozart at nursing homes to Pachelbel at paid wedding gigs. Racing from rehearsals to performances, it felt like my tuxedo was starting to inhabit a permanent spot in my car.

But as the frequency of my rehearsals increased, the frequency of dinners I shared with my family decreased. Though I enjoyed the few dinners we did have together, I started to miss telling my parents about my crazy days and listening to their never-ending stories about the last customer they had to deal with at our granite shop. My parents, wanting me to spend some time with them, asked me to slow down my life a little.

And I tried to—I had no plans to blow past “chapter five” again. But by sixth grade, I’d started another activity that would later consume much of my high school life. I’d begun to love exploring science, and when I learned about Science Olympiad, I had to give it a try.

I began by signing up for only one event: Astronomy.

Inevitably, my involvement skyrocketed. By sophomore year, I was doing ten events, staying up past 3 am to study with my friends countless stressful nights before competitions. Through doing everything with my teammates, even making flamethrowers in the lab together (and getting yelled at for it), Science Olympiad has created some of my closest friendships.

From painstakingly engineering a hovercraft device to move two kilograms of pennies to spending hours staring at diagrams learning about the functions of the human body, I couldn’t imagine a world without Science Olympiad.

But to my surprise, halfway through last year, the coaches called me into a meeting. Nervously, I walked in, wondering what I’d done.

“Aadesh, you’ve gotta drop some events.”

I was relieved—the coaches just wanted me to stop at five events. But cutting the events I did in half was much harder than it should’ve been. I dropped them slowly, one at a time. However, over the months it took to drop four events, I started feeling a different kind of relief. Though I was missing out on unique opportunities to learn, I had gained back some time to relax.

The number of dinners I spent with my family gradually increased. My parents caught me up on the amusing stories I had missed. And we restarted our routine of playing Italian Rummy for hours on end, filled with rivalry and laughter.

So why do I so often go past “chapter five” in my life? (spoiler alert!) It’s because I’m always having fun with what I do, which includes spending time to relax with my family. Maybe my teacher was right after all.