Okay, semester four was actually pretty hard. In three words, this semester was defined by delayed gratification and resilience.
I’ll keep this one pretty short! I learned a lot of hard lessons this semester, which is why it took me the whole summer to decide what I wanted to write about. The two themes that I keep coming back to were…
The difficulty of delayed gratification
My schedule was my worst enemy this semester. On Tuesdays I had five-and-a-half back-to-back classes and meetings without a lunch break. A big challenge was getting some to-do items during, say, my first class, and having to think about it for the rest of the day. Whereas my previous schedules offered me breaks that allowed me the instant dopamine hit of getting stuff done, I found myself restless and grumpy knowing I could just knock this one thing out if I had a few minutes and a computer.
So lesson learned: give myself those get-stuff-done breaks, and if I don’t have them, chill tf out. (One of these will be easier to implement than the other.)
I’m still standing
Before starting grad school, I was at a job that I wasn’t the right fit for. And say what you will about not tying up your self-worth in work, but when your streak of doing bad gets long enough, it wears on you. It got so bad that I felt that I was clawing and scratching my way to the next day through resilience alone. I was surrounded by coworkers who earned their keep by… being good at their jobs. I craved a world where I could be defined by my competence, not my resilience.
This semester showed me that, thankfully, when (not if) my competence falls short, my resilience is there to back me up. I kinda wish I never had to find out. But it’s good to know I still got it.