Aside from the struggles that I've had to endure this past year, I've kept myself busy throughout high school. I've had to balance school, extracurriculars, a job, and my personal life to ensure my success. Starting freshman year, I was in Student Council. Sophomore year, I also began running track, which helped my focusing abilities and made my communication skills grow. Junior year I continued those same activities with the addition of having a job, joining stage crew and link crew. Link crew has helped me blossom into the confident individual I am, and I became a leader. This year, I have only stopped doing stage crew, but I am now the front of house manager for the musical production and I joined best buddies, forensics, and environmental club. Planning everything out is very important, as I am often busy. Therefore, I'm obsessed with using my planner when it comes to doing school work and writing down events that would be taking place in my chaotic life. A specific example of my personal balance is when I had to decide between my quality of mental health and school. As I mentioned earlier, I had dealt with some challenges last year. My mental health had been struggling for a few months, and school had been becoming so much of a stress to me that I no longer wanted to attend school. My morals were still strong, so I forced myself to get out of bed every morning. At some point, I broke down and decided that I needed to be in the Career Certificate program at school, rather than being apart of the Full Diploma Program. The only difference between this decision is that I would have more freedom in my course selection, which I never changed. I dropped the course that was causing me the most problems in school, and continued in my other rigorous courses. My mental health benefited from this decision greatly.