Survival

This post is a follow on, of sorts, from Jim’s post. I have been thinking about the uni/life balance quite a bit lately, and everything seems a little bit more in perspective now.

In this balance, let us define our ‘weights’. University is a place you go to get an education so you can get a job that pays more and is supposedly more fulfilling than a job you could get if you didn’t have an education. You spend several years there and are judged against your peers before being spat out into the real world, clutching a piece of paper and a bill for several tens of thousands of dollars. Life, on the other hand, how can we define this other than by simply saying that it is ‘everything else’.

 Everything else. That includes things like relationships with your friends, your family, perhaps a significant other. It includes extra-curricular passions or interests whether you like playing cricket or the violin, making cakes or treehouses, doing charity work or sudoku puzzles. It encompasses everything else about you and everything else you do. So why are we putting university before EVERYTHING else?

I am all for doing the best I can, trying for good grades and aiming to actually stick with this and graduate. But I can’t see the use in neglecting my life for three years.

I am going to finish my essays and write them brilliantly (I will brag, I write awesome essays which serves me well in philosophy and literature). I’m going to turn up to my classes and read my emails and check the LMS. I’ll organise my notes and sacrifice several square feet of forest so I can photocopy all of the recommended further reading material.

But I won’t give up certain things. I enjoy downing my pen to go for long walks, or deciding to watch a film rather than studying all night. Or saying, “I could read The Waste Land, but I don’t really like T.S. Eliot and I don’t plan on writing an essay on that piece. I’ll concentrate on Lolita instead.” Or taking a Mental Health Day – my friend Gemma coined the term in Year 12. Just one full day to concentrate on activities promoting the recovery or maintainance of mental wellbeing. You could call it laziness, but I would rather consider it to be a step in the direction of looking after ones self.

My little sister is having similar issues right now. She went to the same high school as I, a state-run all-girls high school. But a couple of years ago, she got a scholarship to go to a very private, very expensive, very Christian school with a fantastic music program (she is a cellist). She went and has hated it for a year and a half, and finally has convinced my Mother to let her return to the good ol’ days at that bad ol’ school we shared. It was a surprising school, coming incredibly high in terms of ENTER scores and how many scored above 90, et cetera. But it also serviced the other side of society – i.e. the girls who swear at teachers, the girls who sell drugs behind lockers, the girls who try to kill themselves by overdosing on panadol in the bathroom, the girls who try to gouge out each other’s eyes in the canteen line. It was clearly not a patch on the pristine school that she had been accepted to, with its shiny community values and house choirs and full-scale string orchestra.

But Caitlin wants to go back to our old school, mainly for the fact that she is not allowed to have spares. Lots of people have called her unreasonable, but I hear her loud and clear.

Now I’ll go back to not sleeping and trying to write about Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre!