Struggling through a day—sometimes days even—happens to just about every college student on a regular basis. The course load from some classes brings on a different kind of stress. This stress eats at your self-esteem and sucks up your energy. The vitality that you once possessed slowly slips away into a fading glimmer. But life doesn’t just contain school. Nope. You also have relationships to maintain, whether romantic or not, work to attend and extracurriculars to participate in. Within all of that, it becomes too easy to lose hope when you get overwhelmed or start to fail at your every task.
I’m here to say that inside the storm , there lies the eye. It just takes some time to get there.
Do you ever feel like everybody you know has their life together? Because I get that feeling each and every day. Don’t get me wrong. I love hearing about my friends’ successes and see them out here killing the game with each play that they make. However, I’m not going to lie through my teeth and say that each win comes as a blow to my self-esteem. At a young age, you hear the saying that things are always look nicer from the outside. But looking in at your own life highlights your crummy life situation. It feels as though no matter how much I study, a friend will always score a solid two letter grades higher than me. While I can never find the time for more than a measly five hours, everybody else seems to get a full night’s rest. And on and on the list goes, leaving you to wonder what in the world is wrong with yourself.
I, for one, work along with going to school full-time. Many advise to focus on school and receiving an education, but in order for me to attain this education, I have to scrape up the funds to afford it. Without any financial aid or scholarships, a girl has to do what a girl has to do. The beauty behind it all comes from the fact that school takes place during the day, leaving work for the night. Anyone familiar with working knows night time shifts usually mean closing shifts. When you get off work, you trek on home and then shower off your filth and sometimes eat. After an hour passes by, you somehow find yourself behind your computer hacking away at an assignment or pressing deadline. As three o’clock rolls around, your droopy eyes slowly slide close and your body succumbs to sleep. Seconds later, your eight o’clock alarm screams at you to get ready for your period three class and catch the bus on time. Rinse, wash, repeat.
With so much going on, I find myself cancelling on people if I even bother to make plans in the first place. Nights out at the movies have become distant memories with work leeching on my weekends. Eating out and shopping get declined for studying and homework in the spare free time that I get. Then there comes the squeezing in of extracurriculars and commitments. In no time, I feel at my wit’s end without a second to rest or just time for me. Anything to make a person extremely frustrated from her lack of time and self care. You ever just watch everybody else have fun while you stay at home or punch in some hours? Definitely the best feeling ever. Especially when you try to squeeze in some unproductive, recreation or sleep, and then fall heavily behind on everything.
Now to the bulk of the matter: school. Just recently, I had a professor blatantly tell me that shooting for a C in his course seems like a stretch. The clear lack of faith in my abilities and the acknowledgment of my past low grades hit my core with the force of a wrecking ball. I studied for exam two, I watch the lectures and attempt the weekly quizzes to best of my ability. Despite my efforts, I only scraped by with Cs and Ds, until the whopping F on exam two came along. Meanwhile, the lowest grade of all my peers takes the form of the “formidable” B. Formidable. Along with that course comes a math course that holds the beautiful D letter grade. It kills every string that holds me together to hear of how much it sucks to fail, when in reality I’m the only one actually failing.
What happens in the middle of all of this? I have a panicky breakdown, crying and wallowing in a heap of self-pity. I slump in the growing mess of my room, a bad sign since I am generally a neat person. Shooting for goals that now appear unachievable lost the motivating edge that they once possessed. Now they were just big red x marks taunting me of how much of a failure that I am. And the beauty about messing up everything and just racking up Ls comes from how little everyone talks about their goofs and pitfalls. Can we all just take a moment to admit that as college students, none of us know what the hell to do and how to do it?
In any other writing piece, the end would have a sweet little pick me up. The read would finish off on a nice note about how it gets better and how you, too, can get through it. Sorry to tell you, but this article does not have that ending. I’m still slumping along and trying not to let my failures get the best of me. I think that essentially to live knowing that dips come makes the journey easier.
