“Well, then, why’d you drop the class?”
One late night in September, I was hanging out with a few members of my friend group. We had spent the night in the common room outside our dorms, talking and laughing, trying to unwind after a taxing week. The conversation drifted from topic to topic – from online classes to looming deadlines to coronavirus testing.
Sitting cross-legged at the table in the center of the room, one of my friends questioned me: “Don’t you agree with that, Lexi, that you should never give up? Well, then, why’d you drop the class?”
Those words hurt me like no other. This semester, after trying to figure out which was more important to me – my mental health or a math class I was taking – I decided that the math class was definitely not it. I had spent the first few weeks of the semester struggling through math problems in TA sessions for hours, completing homework assignments that stressed me out, and feeling like I just did not belong in the class. After weighing my options, my mental health, and whether I wanted to go through this struggle for an entire semester of my Williams career, I decided to drop the class.
When my friend brought this up, she poked at a sore spot that had been festering for a while – one that I struggled to even acknowledge. Not only was dropping that class a sign that I had given up, it was a sign that I was, underneath it all, a failure. Simply put, dropping that class was an embarrassment to me.
Coming from a background where I was not given access to all the resources that many students have at Williams, throughout my freshman year, I felt like I was too dumb to be here. Especially as a chemistry major, I wondered if science was even for me, and if I was even smart enough to complete the major. I felt like everyone around me was just waiting for me to mess up. I could see it in the way that some people acted and in the words that they said.
As a result, I spent my entire freshman year trying to prove to everyone else, including myself, that I was smart enough to be on this campus and that I deserved to be here. And I did the same thing this year, until I reached my breaking point. I do not know what broke in me – but I gave up on that math class because I felt that my happiness was somehow more important than my grades and what other people believed about me.
To be totally honest, after telling teachers, students, and friends that I dropped a class, many have looked at me as though I am beneath them – that I am too stupid to be here and that I am not good enough. But the thing is that I will never be able to control what other people think. Whether I am getting straight A’s, struggling and dropping a class, or even both, some people will always find a way to put me down and make me feel lesser. There is no way to control this; the only thing that I can control is how I respond to it.
It has taken me a while, but I have slowly begun to realize that no matter where I go or what I do, there will always be people who think that I am not good enough for a job, talk too much or too little, people who always want to find something to comment on, oftentimes in an attempt to compensate for their own insecurities. And it has definitely taken some growing to get here, but I have learned that it is best to just focus on what I can control and learn to forget about the rest.