Jacqueline Ramirez, Period 1, 5/20/22

 Jacqueline Ramirez, Period 1, 5/20/22

Goal Setting & Growth

At this current point in time, what specific goal(s) do you have for yourself? Why?

How do you demonstrate resilience towards achieving this goal? (or these goals?)

How does the world around you affect your perception of this goal? (or these goals?)

Back in January, before the start of the second semester, I made two goals: 1) manage assignments step by step instead of getting overwhelmed and letting them pile up and 2) start my Youtube channel. Now it’s June, the end of the second semester, and I’m cramming to graduate and am definitely not starting a Youtube channel anytime soon. As I sit and reflect on this, a torrent of thoughts threatens to overwhelm me, however, for some reason, I also don’t know what to type. Where do I start? Technically, I’ve failed in both of my goals. Is there anything adequate I can say? 

So much has happened and I’ve learned so much in these last 5 months, that girl I was in January seems so distant. While the resilience methods I put in place (using accountability tactics and believing in myself) didn’t help me accomplish my initial goals, they helped me with an unforeseen, more broad goal: continuously taking more ownership of my life by experiencing as much of what brings me joy as possible before graduating. I joined SING band as a keyboardist and became one of the four band directors when my friend had to drop the position for another commitment. I brought a dying Korean Culture Club back to life and led 12 members to perform 3 dances at Tech’s multicultural show. I took on a 5th grader under my musical wing and began teaching him music history, music theory, and piano over Zoom on Sunday’s. I got my official diagnosis of narcolepsy with cataplexy and proved to my parents that my hunch back in August was right. Through all these experiences, I’ve gained confidence in my abilities and am improving at using perfectionism to help rather than hurt me. Taking all of this into account plus an unimproved home situation, I would say I did pretty decent for the second half of my senior year. I just need to keep working at improving my life balance.

At this current point in time, my main goals are to graduate from high school, set up for an enriching summer and fall, and wrap up my music school years with a senior recital I’m proud of. Each goal has individual concrete resilience methods with some overarching ideas. For the first goal, I have all my assignments, tests, and senior dates in my calendar so I don’t miss anything major and am going to the library afterschool to finish all my work. For the second, resilience is putting in plans now so that I have things to focus on. So far, I’m set to work in SYEP and hold a July senior piano recital. I still need to sign up for Fordham summer orientation, a scholars program, and choose courses for the fall. For the third, I already put my three collaboration pieces together with friends and will focus on mastering 3 my solo pieces after my school assignments are over. To prepare for performing my recital repertoire, I will play and sing Moon River at my jazz teacher’s studio recital and hold rehearsals for my collaboration pieces at my house. As always, my biggest resilience factor will be believing in myself. I will put up positive posters to remind myself to keep trying and share my goals in a general sense with people I know can encourage me to meet them.

Once again, the last question of the prompt, how does the world around me affect my perception of my goals, feels most difficult to answer. While this goal setting response is going to be on a public forum, I know that mostly only I will be aware of my goals so unless I share my goals verbally, there will really be no one who can affect my goals intentionally. I will get to be the one to hold myself responsible and I will get to be the one with the flexibility to change any or add any goals when I see fit. I have become much more independent and strong over the past year so I’m more confident in my goals and my ability to succeed in some way or form in my future. Something I’ve realized over the past half year with my therapist is that I have many unhelpful thought patterns and confusion about myself that stem from many years of hearing negative words at home and that in order to get more of what I want done, I need to work on gaining ownership over my thoughts, actions, and life and work to change the rhetoric in my immediate environment.