College is fun. You get excited when you make an 87 on your midterm that you spent two days studying for and then you look at the kid beside you’s score and they made a 94, so you automatically think you’re a failure. Especially because they keep bragging about how they hardly studied. So you just sit there like…
What about when you got the perfect Instagram picture but had a miserable time? Or you were just one vote shy of being on your fourth exec board? Or you got out of bed and threw on whatever t-shirt was clean and put on a hat only to have someone ask if you were sick or if it was laundry day? (All of which have happened to me more than once)
It’s even more exciting when that happens two or three times a day, a couple times a week. Then, you go to your meeting of one of the two clubs you’re in charge of and realize that you forgot some little detail about something or that you double booked your meeting, or your event didn’t go as well as you had planned (not hoped) but planned for.
We all want to have the perfect Instagram worthy college experience coupled with that perfect 4.0 GPA and resume full of exec board potions for various clubs.(But more specifically clubs that look great for our major. *looking at you PRSSA*) We want our whole lives to be as perfect as what we put on our socials. But they aren’t and they can’t be and that’s okay.
We get our hopes up for things naturally, but since coming to college, I’ve realized that the standards that I’m setting for myself are not obtainable.
I’m a self-proclaimed racehorse. I only really thrive when I’m pushing myself to the brink of a break down, which allows for some really high, highs when I do get an A on a midterm or the event I planned goes off perfectly. But those lows that come when I get a B after studying for three days or the event didn’t go perfectly or I’m fighting with my friends, are LOW. These standards that I put on myself, my relationships, and everything else have taken me to some pretty incredible places, don’t get me wrong, but it has really started affecting my mental health. I have to stop and remind myself that, yeah, that 87 isn’t an A, but it’s a B+ that I worked really hard for and did all on my own. That some classes are harder for me to understand than they may be for someone else. More importantly when you do badly on a test that you know you studied for, you can’t beat yourself up. Just stop. Learn from it and move on. Chances are your professor will let you go over it and help you understand what you missed. You aren’t going to get ’em every time.
Sometimes no matter how hard you study for a test you’re only going to know so much and there’s probably going to be someone who made a better grade than you. You have to remember that someone else’s success doesn’t belittle yours. Your friendships aren’t always going to be magical and Insta worthy. The clubs you run aren’t ever going to be as easy as you thought they may be. Life happens, stuff comes up, just don’t give up on yourself because life isn’t as great as you thought it would be. College is really f****** hard. Sometimes you just have to be proud of yourself for getting out of bed in the morning.
Sources
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/495818240212755207/
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