#Firstdayofschoolproblems—It's Not That Bad

All the way up until this year, my junior year at , the only thing that could possibly get me excited for school was back-to-school shopping. Otherwise, nothing really appealed to me; the constant sleep deprivation, the stressful late-night studying for tests that could seriously affect my grade, the homework, the never-ending lack of time to do anything fun—Those are negative aspects of school that I most dread.

Or, at least, I used to dread them. They’re still not great factors of high school life, but I look at them differently now.

The phrase “#firstworldproblems” is one I’ve been hearing more often lately, and it has started to actually affect the way I view—and complain about—my problems in life (most of which come from school). Some people know about this hash-tag trend, but most commonly, they’ll see things like #tallpeopleproblems, #longhairproblems, #paleproblems, etc. Usually, hash tags like these are funny, but #firstworldproblems just makes me cringe.

I’m not sure if it has the same meaning for everyone, but for me, tacking #firstworldproblems onto the end of my complaints reminds me that I’m actually really blessed by this life, if I compare it to the lives of people my age in third-world countries.

While a girl in Iran might “complain” about fearing for her life every time she walks to school, I complain about how bad the school-bus smells... #firstworldproblems. While a boy in India might “complain” about missing out on an education entirely because he has to work to support his family, I complain about how much I hate doing math homework. Seriously, #firstworldproblems.

This new perspective didn’t come to me overnight. It took a few years, and especially this summer, when I attended a Christian leadership camp at Duke Divinity, for me to learn to be extremely grateful for the amazing opportunities presented to me through school. School is where I learned how to write, so that I can participate in the Wheaton Patch blog. In school, I discovered and fell in love with photography (see the results of randomly deciding to take Photo 1 as a freshman at Hannah Howell Photography on Facebook!). In school, I learned leadership, problem-solving, and public speaking skills. You can actually learn a lot of great stuff at school (who would have thought?).

So thank you, hash-tag-first-world-problems, for reminding me, and hopefully others, that the first-world life is a pretty great one that we should be very grateful to live. Going to school isn’t a party 100 percent of the time, but it is a place where you meet new friends, have new experiences, and get the chance to do something with your life. All of this is something that a huge portion of the world’s kids won’t get. And that’s something we should really be complaining about.

(But, if I had a choice between an extra week of school and an extra week of summer, I’d go with summer.)