My vent is backed up.
Sometimes my heart breaks for myself.
I understand why I am in the position I am now: to make me stronger, to teach me patience, to feed my persevering spirit. I know that, but it doesn’t mean that I like it.
I feel like this period of my life is like the carrots forced onto your dinner plate as a kid: you know they’re there, you know why, and you know it’s good for you, but you still whine and cry about having to eat it in order to get what you really want.. dessert.
Well, I feel like my life has been full of plates full of carrots recently.
At the beginning of this semester, I was so energized and excited to finally get “real” classes out of the way. For the first time I felt smart and prepared and had a very “lets do this!” attitude about the whole thing. Well, then classes started and two weeks later I was crying uncontrollably in my living room, telling my mom that it was too hard, I was too dumb, and I couldn’t do it. Of course now thinking back on it, it was probably because I was up until 3am trying to do class work and homework two days a week.
Now the semester is nearing its end, and I feel like I’m out of steam. My choo-choo won’t chug along anymore, and it’s getting harder and harder to carry this load. I don’t fully understand it, because the work load has lessened, I’ve been getting amazing grades for the first time ever, and I have more free time.
I think what’s getting to me is a culmination of things, the current popularity of Chicago (my dream city), my lack of social interaction outside of class, and graduation season.
I generally tend to think that I’m a happy person when it comes to the success of others. I love being able to participate in parties and events that celebrate an incredible achievement of someone I hold dear. It’s just the word “graduation” that kills me.. It has too many bad connotations in my personal life story, and surprisingly the fact that I’ll be 22 and still in community college isn’t the part that hurts- I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that I was lost, scared, and unwilling to change my life path in high school and my freshman year of college. I didn’t succeed because I was afraid to, and I held myself back because I wasn’t ready to move on with my life- it’s the fact that I don’t have faith that I can pass my remaining classes. Why? Because they’re hard and I’ve always struggled in them, because I always believed that “if I don’t know it already or aren’t good at it, then I’m not meant to do it.” It’s a pretty immature thought, I know that now, but back then (last year and beyond) it was my life’s motto.
I like to place myself in the category of big fish in a small pond. (Beware of shameless self flattery in this coming statement.) I’m a really smart person, I always have been. I spoke two fluent languages by the time other kids were learning how to speak one, I was always 2-5 grade school years ahead in my reading and writing levels, I loved to read in my spare time, and I always had to know everything. My life goal was simple- to learn everything there is to learn. Yeah, I was that kid.
All of the teachers who failed me always said the same thing, “she’s very smart, she just needs to apply herself.” Being smart was easy, because I was seemingly surrounded by dumb kids, but what those kids had that I didn’t was determination. No matter how badly they wrote or spoke or read, they kept trying and kept moving forward. The real dumb kids, I believed, were the ones who gave up. So, I was seemingly a smart kid trapped inside of a dumb kid’s body. If I didn’t find it fun or interesting, I gave up. I never tried and pushed myself, I just believed that if it was hard it meant that it wasn’t for me.
My broken mentality about what makes a person smart carried me through high school. I only graduated because I decided to really try and work hard, for the last four months of my senior year. Before that, absolutely nothing. I don’t ever remember finishing a project, getting my homework graded, reading an entire book, or studying for a single minute those entire four years. I remember being the smartest girl who could drink you under the table. I guess you could say that was my new goal, to be free and fun loving while schooling those who were older than me and could barely read. I was “it.”
As I entered community college, I looked at my time there as Bukowski looked at his. It was just a place to shoot the shit, hang out, and sometimes go to a class. I deliberately never met with a counselor because I knew they would make things harder for me- as it was obviously the high school counselor who told me that I was in danger of not graduating that ruined my senior year. I took theater classes, clung on to those I knew like a barnacle, and worked on making friends.
Sometime between then and now I got a job. An easy job at a horrible place that broke my spirit and excitement for work every day. I stayed again, because it was easy and I was good at it. It was then that God- or a higher being of your choosing- decided that he had enough with my attitude towards life. An accident occurred at work, a stupid and lame sounding accident, that really hurt me. This accident lead to nearly a year of physical therapy, constituting of hydrotherapy, electroshock therapy, and mind fuckingly painful massages. I took about 5 or 7 different types of medications, including steroids, saw about 3 different doctors and 5 different physical therapists, and then the inevitable surgical specialist. This man changed everything for me. My doctor fought for me, believed in me, and did everything he could to help me. He discovered the problem, operated, and healed me in so many ways.
That was the longest year of my life to date, and the most painful. I was spit on and battered by their insurance company, my bosses, and my coworkers. My disability was a joke and I was labeled an exaggeration of epic proportions. Even my family gave up on me, finding my cane and me to be a bit too much in regards to needing assistance- again, I was partially immobile for a year.
That horrible year opened up my eyes to every single thing I never wanted to see, everything I shielded myself from. People are always nice and willing to help, my family will always be there no matter what, if I want something I have no other option but to do it myself, all doctors truly care, I can do anything I want and don’t need sleep or breaks in between. Man, was I wrong. I felt like that year smashed my face into reality for the first time in my life. I knew I had to change [damn near] everything in my life.
Well, now I’m here.
I decided to go back to school (I never left but I figured 1-2 classes a semester to be sufficient) and get it done, to light a fire underneath myself and prove that my mind was going to open up the world for me. I was going to study for the first time since the one night I tried in my freshman year of college. I was going to do it, prove to myself what my brain and I are truly capable of, and move forward.
My dream of grandeur is (please don’t laugh when you read this..) medical school.
To get into medical school you have to be focused, driven, intelligent, and above all determined. To be a doctor, to me, is the only reasonable profession in which you can look at yourself and say that you truly are what you set out to be. You did it, you alone, and your brain and will were your driving force.
Being a doctor is being a scientist, and being a scientist requires several years of study and tutelage to the fundamentals: math and science, obviously. Now, as I have said before, I always believed that if something was hard, it wasn’t meant for me. I have never been good at, and rarely tried to succeed in, the fields of math and science. Every time I walked into a class that ended with the term “ology” I walked in defeated. Every time I opened a book and saw nothing but numbers and symbols, I gave myself a mental “F” automatically. It was hard, so it wasn’t for me.
While it’s good to have an end goal in mind, it’s very detrimental for people like me: those with no patience and high anxiety. So I can choose to focus on doctorly attributes, achievements, qualities and standards, but I’m not going to. The problem now is trying to stop myself from focusing on getting into my dream university, especially when I have finished only roughly half of the units required to finish community college.
I believe that I’m scared to finish this semester out strong, because I’m afraid to move forward again. I’m afraid to move on to the classes that I have come to fear the most in my endlessly long 21 years of life. Okay. I’m scared. Also, I’m feeling extremely lazy for no apparent reason, but let’s stick to the fear part. I’m afraid to pass these classes because I’m afraid to continue on and fail the others. It’s almost like I would just like to be a doctor without actually having to do all the learning and studying- yikes! Malpractice anyone?
The most painful part is knowing that I am a smart individual, but that I keep trying to stop myself from succeeding even though it’s what I want the most. I’m not sure.
All I know is that I am young, resilient, and strong. If I could grow a little more determination and will, that would be incredible! Until then, I think that I need to stop making excuses and just do it. If I fail now, it will be entirely on my shoulders and I can’t do that to myself. I know me, I’ll go insane if I let myself down! I can be quite the bitch when I’m let down.
So, I think I now need to put my puppy to bed, take a quick pee break, and bust out my homework as if my life depends on it, because you know what? It really does.
