This post should be dedicated to my dad, but I’m fairly sure that he doesn’t read these.
I know just last week I wrote about surviving four midterms, but I’m back again with another post on general college-test-grades stress.
Have you ever felt so blindingly unprepared for an exam that the moment you sat down to do it, you felt like bursting into tears and walking out of the classroom? That was me, with my buckets-of-fun take-home midterm this weekend. Why one of my professors decided to assign our next midterm just a week after the last one, I’ll never know, but I was saddled with the task just the same, and it felt daunting.
Given my assignment, I sat through the rest of my classes on Friday feeling ill. I could think of nothing else-- just the mountain before me that I felt duly unprepared to climb. I was scrambling better than any egg, spiraling like the best of kites, and at one point even considered changing my major. With every question I didn’t understand came its resulting mantra: you’re too stupid for this class.
I ended up hysterically calling my parents, crying in public, and doing a lot of other fairly undignified things before I calmed down long enough to remember that I’ve done impossible things before. I have several summits under my belt that at first glance seemed insurmountable.
While this entire college thing generally seems like we’re doomed to four years of rolling the same rock up the same hill only to have it come crashing down, I’d like to share with you a little advice that my father tells me on just about a daily basis.
The things that we struggle with build character. We must fail in order to persevere, and it is perseverance that gives us strength, that prepares us for what else may be in store.
When I was a little kid and I didn’t want to do something, my dad would always say, “It builds character.”
Washing dishes? Builds character. Walking home on a hot day? Builds character? Not being able to go to a friend’s house? Builds character. Doing my chores, getting along with my sister, reading a book instead of watching tv, all these things were doing the hard work of constructing something I didn’t even know I had.
What is your character? What defines the strength of your spirit if not your ability to keep moving forward despite hardships? When will all of the building be finished so I can have my silly little life without having to break down in tears in order to ‘build my character’?
I’m a little on the fence in terms of how much I believe my dad, about this whole ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ sort of a deal. I mean, your midterms shouldn’t come close to killing you, right? I shouldn’t have to keep pushing for the sake of my character when my mental well-being is dangerously close to the crying-in-public phase… right?
There’s a balance you have to find to succeed, in college and in everything else, and it’s a balance I haven’t totally gotten down yet. I was taught to do everything I could to the very best of my ability, but I’ve had to learn through lots of trial and error that my best doesn’t mean working on my take home for 14 hours this weekend in order to squeeze out as many points as I can. It means taking most of Saturday to celebrate my friend’s birthday, because she only turns 20 once. It means doing what I can, but getting lots of rest, taking lots of breaks, and knowing when to call it good enough. It means not endlessly re-reading my blog post looking for typos, and just posting the damn thing because there will always be some way to edit it.
I hope the next time you encounter something that makes you want to throw up your hands and yell, “I quit!” that you remember how much your character is going to grow if only you see it through. I hope you also remember to give yourself some slack, to take a break, and take care of yourself before all else.
