We All Looked Up

The stress of school can get to all of us at times, but Peter feels like he’s all alone with his feelings of anxiety and self doubt while he’s dealing with college applications, football scholarships, and the general day-to-day stresses of High School. In the novel “We All Looked Up” by Tommy Wallach, 16 year old Peter is introduced as one of the main characters. All 4 of the central characters are going through similar struggles because they are all in the same part of their life. Although as you read you can see that Peter seems to struggle the most with the transitional stage between high school and the rest of his life. He is constantly doubting himself and his actions, and is always stressing out about how he cannot control the path his life is going to take in the future.

We can see his feelings of anxiety when he starts to doubt himself and goes to his favourite teacher to get some counselling. He asks him if he thinks that guys that are varsity athletes in high school hit their peak, then have their lives go downhill from there. He asks that because deep down he thinks that he has already hit his peak in life. A quote that really describes how Peter’s feeling in a nutshell is “This fear, of squandering your future, was already on your mind. I just underlined it for you.” The teacher that he goes to for advice is the one that tells him the hard truth, when Peter asks him about his lecture on the difference of success and happiness earlier in class. Peter’s worries do not affect how he communicates with other characters in the story, because he tends to keep his feelings bottled