I think you are really blowing this out of proportion. No offense - I’m saying it to make you feel better.
First of all, your CR and W scores are in the 94th and 99th percentile, respectively, and put you in the middle 50% of accepted applicants at Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Princeton, and UPenn. They’re also only slightly outside of the middle 50% at Harvard and Yale.
Second of all, “Ivy League vs. state school” is a false dichotomy. There are a HUGE number of universities - many of them very selective and providing excellent educations - between the Ivy League and your local regional public. FOr example, your CR and W scores are also in the middle 50% of accepted students at places like Boston College, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, University of Southern California, Tufts, and Wake Forest. These are in the top 30 universities in the country. That’s not even considering top liberal arts colleges like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Pomona, Haverford, Harvey Mudd, and Wesleyan - all of which you are in the range for, too.
Thirdly…if you are interested in actuarial science as a major, a public university might actually be a good choice, as they are usually the ones who offer actuarial science as a major. (Note, though, that you can take the coursework needed to prepare you for the actuarial exams at a variety of schools, and you can major in something like applied mathematics instead.)
You are not bad at English. You are exceptional at math and you are very good at English. You have an A- in honors English. That is very good; that means that you are doing better than most of the class. Having to put in a lot of effort to achieve top grades in something doesn’t mean you are “bad” at it. “Bad” means that you are incapable of achieving top grades even if you spent all possible time on it. Consider also that if there are 12 National Merit Finalists in your high school of just 800 students (or is that 800 seniors? doesn’t matter actually) that you probably go to a very good school. College students don’t get into top colleges because they are NMSF or NMFs; they get in because they have high SAT scores. You have very high SAT scores, so don’t worry about that. But the corollary is that your honors English class is probably difficult and rigorous, and that means that it might be equivalent to an AP class at a less rigorous school. So you can go to a technical or science-focused school if you want to, but I don’t think you have to choose a place like that - you are quite capable (based upon grades and test scores) of achieving in writing/English at a top school.
Don’t let the college admissions pressure cooker get to you. You are an excellent student with excellent prospects at the nation’s top colleges. Even if you don’t get into places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (who admit less than 10% of their applicants - so basically their applicant pool is filled with young people like you, and a rejection is no reflection on your qualifications), you have excellent prospects at a variety of other very, very, very good schools that attract the best students in the country (world!).
On a completely unrelated note, your post made me really curious - I had no idea what NM Commended Status meant in high school, even though I got this award as a senior (and was a National Achievement Scholarship recipient). I just looked it up and realized that I, too, missed NMSF status by about 1 or 2 points in high school, lol.