HAPPY BIRTHDAY THOMAS JEFFERSON!! THANK YOU GOOGLE CALENDARS FOR THAT FUN FACT!!!
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| The Most Rad of Presidents |
Woke up later than intended, neglected my paper until I rolled in early for Quantum Mechanics, and did some review for the exam on Wednesday, which means it's time to panic yaaay. Then I walked over to Water and Soil Chemistry and finished learning about complexation and coordination chemistry according to my notes, which is nice because that is the only thing I remember from AP Chem, thanks Mrs. Anderson. A kid also managed to fall asleep, which was nothing short of remarkable because there were literally four students in the room. I love undergrads!
Then I read about regionalism in the Western Hemisphere, aka NAFTA and Mercosur my favourite regional trade agreements. After that, I did some research and footnoting about Mercosur and ASEAN (*frustrated stamping*). So that was my break.
After that, headed over to Europe and the International System, where the discussion we had about regionalism led to a major breakthrough with regards to the paper, and that was fucking great, because after that class I spent another hour in the library writing up the abstract and conclusion, and finished off the precursor to my honors thesis at 27 pages and 7,907 words of text about dispute settlement mechanisms. I am a scholar! I am good at things!
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| Me Doing Things |
After that, I tried halfheartedly to do work that's due but I have a hard time producing quality work without a lot of pressure behind me regarding deadlines. Welcome to the mind of a problematic high achiever, where it's either the crippling fear of failure, genuine laziness and apathy, or the knowledge that our best work is performed just before the buzzer sounds that makes us put things off until the last minute. Even we don't know why our brains work the way they do—I've conducted several intensive studies on the matter (by which I mean I talked to other nerds on Facebook that should have been writing their Poet Casebooks at four in the morning on the day they were due our senior year of high school and we all ended up getting 100% and "I can tell you put a lot of time into this." Yeah. Sure. We'll go with that). So I ended up watching 30 Rock and reading about Hillary.
I like high achievers a lot. I'm a little biased—we would always cause a little too much trouble when we'd get bored with watching Between the Lions in 2nd grade (I will always hold a huge grudge against Jeffco for consistently forcing me to watch that fucking crap. I KNEW WHAT A VERB WAS I WAS READING AND ANALYZING NANCY DREW AT AGE SEVEN OK). I'll always also have a huge bias against No Child Left Behind (of the three Rose kids, it's questionable that only Mason benefitted from that legislation, and 1/3 isn't exactly the success rate you want) because it doesn't let anyone do any more than the bare minimum. I hated that. I was stifled by it. I had a lot of good teachers that let me learn advanced math and read at a tenth grade level in fifth grade and put me on an ALP, but nobody really knew what to do with the kids that were straining at the leash.
AP and honors helped in high school. I could do what I wanted, when I wanted. I was challenged for the first time in my life. That was rad. I was excited to learn, because for once I could. I wasn't limited by my peers. There wasn't a glass ceiling that I had to bat against anymore.
Until there was.
That's when it starts. The "all these people are expecting me to know when the church split into Eastern Orthodox and Catholicism," the "just five more minutes of cramming for this test I know front and back and then I can sleep," the "I'll probably be fine with Sparknotes, but I'll read Heart of Darkness just in case," the "I can't fail because people don't expect me to."
Which is when it becomes problematic. Because you don't want to be that failure. You've always been too big to fail. You're the high achiever. You can't not achieve. That's not you.
And yeah, maybe I'm a little bit of a Type A and I thought expectations were higher than they actually were and maybe it's because I'm a girl and have to work harder to convince people that I am to be taken seriously. But that made me fucking miserable when I had to confront the fact that I could indeed fail. When you're in that role, you assume that even if you fail because you're a human and sometimes there's a little too much going on psychologically that can prevent you from doing quality work, it's stigmatized. You're bad. It's not right.
I guess what I'm saying is that nobody ever taught me that it was okay to fail and to not be good at something. And only after a couple of really traumatic experiences did I ever learn that, and that's unhealthy and I will be perpetually bitter about that.
It's okay to fail. There is nothing wrong with you just because you failed a test or didn't get the guy or didn't get into Yale. Repeat that, high achievers. It is perfectly fine to have your biggest accomplishment for the day be "getting out of bed" or "didn't burn my grilled cheese." Make me repeat that, because sometimes I forget it a lot.
Okay. Rant over.
I'm going to catch up on the blog I promise, though I'm over a week behind and have hella papers to write so it's questionable.
Thanks for reading :)
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