How to Forget Happiness

by LyraAlluse

Step Seven: Challenge the System

Step Seven: Challenge the System

In the ninth grade, you must go out of your way to avoid joining clubs or pep rallies. Don’t be on the mare volleyball team. Don’t become a cheerleader. Don’t be what the system wants you to be. Go out of your way to be an individual. Spray paint a list written in gold lettering on the gymnasium wall about all of the ways one can prepare potatoes.

Wear pajamas to school every day of the week. Heck, even wear the ones with the back end hanging open. Write one-liners for all of the essay questions you receive on every test your teachers give you. Make them memorable, small poems that stick in your teachers' minds. They may not earn you a passing grade, but they will be the kind of answers that force your teachers to think.

Write papers and make presentations that are off the wall. Write about Yakyakistan Pop Culture for your non-fiction class. Write about toad warts as a pain killer for biology. Make a presentation about the different aspects of fantasy for your speech class. Go wild. Don’t let sensibility hold you back.

Ditch classes when necessary. Wear sunglasses to math class, so the teacher won’t know you’re sleeping. Draw comics in the classes you are forced to take that have no purpose in the grand scheme of your future life. Play the piano every day after school, even though you don’t know a note of it, and your improvisation sucks.