Happiness Is Hard By: William Bleier and Gabriel Albarracin

In this day and age, it's hard to find scenarios or stuff that makes us happy for longer than a few hours. Whether it's playing a certain video game or watching cars for the 1000th time, the happiness is temporary because it's in the moment. It doesn't help when teachers ask you sin(5x)+1=2cos^2(2x) or how the camera angles in this scene help express the characters' emotions. 

Even holidays like Halloween or school breaks like Summer Vacation didn’t feel the same this year. People said that 11th grade would be difficult, and at first, we didn’t believe them, but now we do. We are facing brand new experiences that kindle all kinds of emotions like sadness or fear, but we must persevere. Since we were in school, we were constantly thinking our minds were always busy thinking about the future, whether that be short-term or long-term.

Kendrick Lamar once said, “The hardest thing for - not only an artist but for anybody to do is to look themselves in the mirror and acknowledge, you know, their own flaws and fears and imperfections and put them out there in the open for people to relate to it.”As High school students, we can confirm that the hardest thing is showing your true self; many other students put on a facade or mask that makes them a completely different person, showing a different side that they believe satisfies others. 

We are no strangers to this because we do this not only at school; but also in other environments we are not yet comfortable with. We understand that we may never be comfortable in these environments, but at least we try. We try our best to find happiness by putting ourselves in different situations, finding new hobbies, and exploring new experiences. At the end of the day sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, which makes sense because happiness is hard.