When I was a kid, I remember Jared from Subway, who, in commercials, claimed he lost over 200 pounds just by eating Subway sandwiches and constantly presented before and after photos of his progress. He even showed his jeans of when he weighed more than 400 pounds as a comparison to his then much slimmer weight.

While my brother and I knew that you do much more than eat Subway sandwiches to lose 200 pounds, the effects still stuck with us — Subway became our go-to “healthy” fast-food restaurant. …

Throughout my life, my favorite video game was Final Fantasy X. In particular, however, one mini-game in the game meant a lot to me — Blitzball. I know not everyone who has played the game loves Blitzball, but I loved sports and I loved Japanese RPGs. I also happen to love sports anime like Kuroko’s Basketball, but I wish I realized that when I was younger.

Blitzball is a game that heavily divides much of the Final Fantasy community. Some people absolutely hate it. There is one section of the game where you are forced to play blitzball, and it’s…

I’m going to let you in on a secret: the first paragraph of every article I write feels like trash. Sometimes, the first paragraph of every article I write is trash. I sometimes scrap it, but I almost always revise it heavily. The second paragraph is less trash, but it’s less important how high-quality the writing actually is. What’s important is how it feels.

The writing feels choppy. It doesn’t feel natural. A 14-year-old could write better than this, you start thinking to yourself. …

I seem to be doing well in many respects. I am doing well as a teacher right now and most students love my class. Their reading levels and test scores have gone up, but many are simply just having fun. I have all A’s in my Master’s in Education program. I am able to get a lot done writing and editing. I am running about 65 miles a week (although I took a down week of 45 miles this week), and my studying for evening law school is going very well.

However, as of late I seem to have one…

Local university admissions officer, Cole Smith, has expressed significant frustration and cynicism at his five-year-long job. Year after year, he reads bland, generic, and boring college essays about college applicants claiming they’re not like other college applicants. In fact, about 99.9% of college applicants gave some sort of message that “I’m not like other college applicants” on their applications.

Smith fears that he has become a horrible person. He no longer cares about anyone’s hard, arduous work to move up from the JV basketball team to the varsity basketball team, only to play two minutes all season. …

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.” — Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

The above words have been heard across English classes all over America, on inspirational posters everywhere. On job interviews, I can imagine people often say “I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference” in response to huge life decisions. I can imagine thousands of college essays that cite these same words from Robert Frost. …

Hi Invisible Illness readers and writers!

First, we’d like to plug our writing contest again. It is a call for all mental health professionals and clinicians to submit work based on their expertise! The deadline is May 7, 2021, at 11:59 p.m., so we still have several weeks before submissions are closing.

On another note, we would like to shout out 10 of our standout stories from the last week as usual, all of which were curated. Here they are:

“I Won’t Ever Work 40 Hours a Week, and That’s Okay” — Rozemarijn van Kampen

“When I was 19, I had a summer job at the company my father worked at. I was only for…

I used to be a terrible teacher.

In my first year as a teacher, I was boring. I was the boring teacher who stuck too close to the script and was too afraid to go off the lesson plan.

Now, a lot of my students talk about me saying they have a lot of fun in my class. A lot of my students say I’m one of their fun teachers and they look forward to coming to my class. Parents tell me their kids talk about my class all the time.

What engaging my students has taught me is engaging…