ATTENTION 2024 HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES:
Need some extra money for college?
Abbey’s Bakery will proudly be awarding 2x $500 Scholarships.
You could be one of the recipients, and applying is easy!
Write a short essay including an introduction about you (who you are, where you attended high school, where you plan to attend college & field of study) AND tell us about ONE of these 3 topics:
What have you learned about mental health during your high school years and how will you apply it in the years to come
What can we do as a society to end the stigma surrounded mental health
What will you do in college to raise awareness for mental health
Congratulations to our winners: Hein Ton & Grace Newman
We wanted to extend an epic THANK YOU to all of the graduating seniors who applied for our scholarship. You were all so raw and honest and showed such courage, strength, thoughtfulness and resilience when you shared your stories. This made the selection close to impossible, but we are honored to announce our two winners and share their essays here for all to read So, Congratulations to Kate Pavlovcak and Hannah Upright. Again thank you to all who applied. Please always remember that You are not alone! It’s ok to not be ok! and It’s always ok to ask for help.
2023 Winners:
Is/Was by Kate Pavlovcak
“He’s my best friend.” I say.
My grammar has never been worse.
Throughout elementary, middle, and high school, I have always been the one student who loved grammar class. Initially, I liked the structure of it. The complex web of rules that are fundamental to our language. I was always good at it too. I had friends who would ask me to tutor them, but our sessions always ended in frustration. I couldn’t explain why the use of a preposition was making a sentence of their active tense essays read more passive, I just knew. Grammar has always felt so intuitive to me. Once I’ve heard a teacher introduce a new rule, I file it away with the others and it updates whatever system I have in place that makes proper comma placement second nature.
Knowing the rules of grammar also means you know how to break them. I know that repetition and an overuse of conjunctions and a lack of commas can create an effect different from short, concise phrases. I discovered the power of breaking the rules in high school. While other kids were sneaking out or getting high, I was using an unique sentence structure to make my closing argument for Mock Trial more emotionally compelling to the jury. I’ve learned that in one case, the grammar does not come that easily.
He is my best friend.
He was my best friend.
How does tense change when someone you loved dies? What about when he dies suddenly and leaves questions that will never be answered?
A little over a year, when my best friend tragically died by suicide, he changed my life forever. Of all the questions he left and of all the problems I need to solve, the one that seems the
most pressing is the choice between is and was. Is he still my best friend? We never stopped being friends. I never wanted our friendship to be in the past. He’s still one of the first people I want to tell when something exciting happens or I have a new secret.
But I can not tell him my secrets or my victories or my shortcomings. I can not bring him my problems and ask him to solve them anymore. I can not get his help to study for an AP test. I can not facetime him asking how his first year of college is and beg him to let me visit. .
I will never be able to finish the conversations we had just started, or start the ones we hadn’t begun.
So, was. He was my friend. In the past tense.
But I think about him everyday, and probably every minute. On days where I can’t get him out of my head it feels like every thought is tied to him. So in that way, he is. He will always be apart of who I am. His memory and his jokes and the things his did to annoy me are still things I will think about everyday, so is.
I’ve struggled with my own mental health a lot during high school, but nothing had ever winded me like losing him. I had never felt more crushed, more hollow, in my entire life as the waves of grief crashed against me again and again. But as they slowed down, I noticed a shift in myself. The anxieties that had plagued me for years did not seem important at all anymore. So many things in life mattered more than getting the best grades. The millions of little mistakes I could make seemed so much less daunting. The paranoia of friends not liking me didn’t matter, because I had my life and I knew how precious that was. I had people who I knew cared about me as much as I cared about him, and as those small anxieties lost their weight, my entire mind felt free.
I was still in the midst of my loss and my grief, but my priorities became much clearer. There’s a lot about my friend that I admire and will always want to emulate, but there’s a lot I can learn from his mistakes as well. Those lessons I know well now, and my life has improved so much since learning them. Nothing will ever make up for the loss of my friend, but I have become a better person and friend because of what he has taught me.
Hannah Upright
I am Hannah Upright, an 18-year-old who just graduated from North Penn High School, and I am onto bigger and better things. Starting with a few classes at Montgomery Community College and then, when I am ready, studying wildlife biology at a college down south.
It's fair to say that I've learned much about myself mentally in my last few years of High School. After years of putting up a facade and staying in the shadows to hide my depression and anxiety, I ended up at rock bottom my last year of middle school. I went into a residential facility where I ended up being there for 70 days. I missed out on many important moments because of it, and only after I entered High School did I realize how I ended up in that position.
It always seemed that the students around me either "had it worse" or were not struggling. I felt like an outlier and searched for people who were in similar positions to me. In middle school, I surrounded myself with people who had trouble with their mental health, and it seemed beneficial at the time. But when I went into the residential facility, it was clear they weren't interested in helping their mental health and didn't want to put their energy into someone focused on progress. I felt abandoned when I realized they had all moved on with their lives except me. So when I came back, I decided to surround myself with friends who were a bit different, supportive but also struggling kids who talked and seemed to want to grow. This was good for the first year; those friends helped me open up about difficult things and made me more outgoing and independent. Though my final year of High School was different, I had made lots of progress and was proud of how far I'd come. The same was not accurate for my friends. As they still struggled despite all their talk of progress, it became clear they never were interested in working on themselves. They began to point out the faults they saw in me and my actions and would be angry when I wasn't always sad or anxious like I used to be. I realized that they were never genuine in wanting to be friends and were only looking for someone to relate to and get validation for their actions. So when I worked on myself and stopped enabling them for their negative behavior, they became envious. It was tough dealing with how to handle the situation, as I felt like I was abandoning them as I had felt years prior. Still, after months of journaling and reminiscing, I realized if I wanted to continue to grow and not end up back in a residential facility, I needed to move on. So by the time graduation came around, I had lost those friendships but reconnected with friends from elementary school who were proud of how far I'd gone and never tried to take advantage of our relationship. I am now living in an apartment on my own and focusing on finding good people and surrounding myself with them. I put too much energy into relationships that only brought me down, and throughout high school, the results showed. I was never one to say that people around you can significantly impact your mental health. Still, after graduating, I will stand by the idea that who you surround yourself with and who you put your energy into matters.
I'm looking forward to college as I can have another chance to find and build my support system and make new connections without my past struggles holding me down. I know how much of an impact it will have on my mental health, and I am excited to use what I've learned in order to grow.