Everyone —and I do mean everyone— claims that college is hard. Even though I would hear that phrase time and time again, I would always internalize the phrase and flip it — that doesn’t apply to me, though! Sure, keeping up with deadlines and balancing your time can be challenging, but I always believed that going through courses and homework would be work, yes, but would not be grueling.
All through high school and prior, I was known by my family and my peers as a straight A student. Homework was annoying but manageable, tests and exams were a breeze, and it felt like school was not a challenge at all. Getting started with college, I held the same mindset that I held my entire life — as long as you do the (easy) work, you would get good grades and go far.
This was not true. For me, and for many others.
It may be a number of factors, but in hindsight, I should have known that college would not be the cakewalk that any prior education was for me. However, it was the culmination of many things that made me feel blindsided by not being ‘the smartest’ anymore. There are so many people on campus, and seeing many of them being equal or better than me in classes took me by surprise (by no means an attack).
Along with this realization, I had already internalized my worth with my grades and performance in school. I managed to get through my first year of college here at MSU fine, but it wasn’t until the second year where I started to fall behind on my own expectations. It wasn’t that others were hard on me, but I was irrationally hard on myself. I knew that the workload was heavy, the topics discussed were intense, and the homework extensive, yet I began to feel that I was incompetent and that something wrong had happened to me.
It may sound irrational and slightly laughable to some, but my mental health was affected by my grades in the reverse way that you would expect. I wasn’t depressed or stressed that I had assignments to do, but that my grades on the assignments would not be high enough, and in turn, would reflect that I was not enough.
My friends and classmates would try to bring me back to reality— they agreed that the exams were hard, grades would be exchanged, and the same “college is hard” rhetoric would come back to me again. While these interactions slightly lessened my anxiety, I had to rely on myself for my mental health and for a change in my mentality.
I’ve spent so much of my life putting value on school because it was something that I was ‘naturally’ good at, to the extent that I pushed myself to be the best academically, because that way I would be praised and recognized. My imagined ‘failure’ took my self worth away from me. If I wasn’t good in school, then was I good at anything?
Dismantling this ideology within myself was by no means easy, but I felt that it had to be necessary if I was to continue being in school. Placing internal value in an external entity was not healthy— your internal value should be yours entirely. Rankings, scores, opinions, and actions of others do not equal your value. This is where I had to start.
We are more than grades. We’re more than others’ opinions, a ranking, etc. I had to remind myself constantly that just because my grades were slipping, or I didn’t get the score that I wanted, didn’t mean that I was any less worthy or valuable. I am and still will be the same before and after a grade, from the past, present, and from here on out. The ones closest to me did not see me as a different person or in a negative light, and the things that are valuable about me do not include an external unit. While there can be outside achievements or accomplishments that you can be proud of or strive for, a lack of a perceived achievement does not equal a lack of your own personal value.