I guess that for so long I have been held to such high standards and expectations, that I started to expect them of myself. Then suddenly, those expectations got higher and harder. I wanted to be able to do everything, and do everything right.

I wanted to play basketball, soccer, tennis, chorus, take honors classes, get my Gold Award, go a role model, and a leader. And so far I have done all of these things; but at what cost?

I secretly stay up till midnight doing homework, because I had other things. Then I would wake up at 5am to do it all over again. But I never would tell anyone for the fear of not being able to do all of the things I love.

But that's when I started to realize that my body can only take so much.

I began to get extremley stressed. Knots would form in the muscles in my back. My stomach would ache from the worry, and it felt like there was nothing I could do. I tried everything from breathing in patterns to walking around with a fake smile.

I became so emotional that one comment could send me into a tail spin. I had no control.

And sadly, and two people in my life have been able to see how stressed and upset I had become. My mother and my French teacher. Of all people, my French teacher saw what was going on and she decided to take action instead of just letting it go; instead of just thinking is was teenage drama.

After the bell rang one day, I got up from my desk and headed toward the door, but my teacher stopped me. She waited till everyone was out of the room and then she asked me how I was doing. I honestly didn't know what to do, say, or feel. So she began to explain how she has seen me getting a little frustrated in class when I didn't understand something, or when I got really upset when I blanked on a test or got a bad grade.

And as she was talking, it took all the strength in my body not to cry. Someone had finally seen what I was going through and wanted to talk about it. I tried to talk but my voice was cracking from the emotions. No one had ever really stopped to talk to me about how I felt. And the more she talked the better I began to feel, as if she was lifiting the stress off of me.

And she said something to me that I think about whenever I get so upset I don't know what to do. Here is what she said: "You are a perfectionist. And I know that it can be a good thing, but I can also be bad. And you need to learn to let it go."

Had she not said those words to me, I might have just continued down that path of never telling anyone how I felt. Just keeping all my emotions in, and not letting anyone or anything else in.

I am so grateful that someone had to the compassion to stand up and talk about something very important to me. Even though I never asked, I needed it. She was the teacher everybody knew, but the silent hero only I knew.