Chapter Eleven: Toning It Down (~jinghan)

My phone buzzes. It’s a text.  “Oh god jing, can I just quit uni? It’s so overwhelming and I don’t know how to deal.”

I calmly punch back consoling words, but what I’m really thinking is how much those words summarise how I’m feeling as well.

You think first year is going to the toughest year of uni, and at the end of the year you breath a sigh of relief. But now that I’m here, toughing it through second year, I realise that things are as tough now as they were a year ago, if not more – the challenges are still there, just with different names and faces and I have to get to know them and learn to deal with them all over again.

Maybe that was my downfall, I thought that once I had made it through first year, second year would be a breeze. That I would know the ropes and everything would just work out so long as I put in the effort.

I was wrong.

It’s 6:30pm when I type to my friend, “I’m going to go to bed. I feel crap.”

“Stressed?”

“I don’t know what it is. I feel like I’m struggling to get on top of myself, and that if I don’t everyone will get sick of me whinging about it.”

“:( These sorts of things take time. But you’re getting better at it.”

I almost say, as if you know that. But somehow his conviction make me believe it. “Do you think so?”

“mmms. You’re getting better 🙂 i guess it’s just finding what works for you.”

“mmm life feels sort of out of balance. I want to do everything. And I don’t want to confront the fact that I can’t do everything all at once.”

“mmm well I think what might help the most is accepting that you can’t. and accepting that worrying about it won’t really work. I guess you just ahve to do as much as you can day by day. Think of what can be done now, what can be done later.”

Somehow the need to bury my face in my pillow and feel crap has faded. It’s so obvious, and so true, what he is saying. And yet only now I am starting to admit it to myself.

Second year has it’s challenges, because you have all those expectations that you set up in first year to try and meet. And you want to do better, be more on top of things, get through it smoother…

I grab a scrap of paper and write out all the things that I’m trying to get done in a week. And I draw in arrows and write down the laziest way to get each of them done.

KLC:

  • notes (lecture) –> don’t bother neatening up what you write in during lectures
  • notes (tutoral) –> ditto

Info:

  • notes (lecture) –> leave this until swotvac
  • tutorial (work) –> get through backlog eventually…

Complex:

  • notes x3 –> try just writing these in the lecture
  • tutorial work –> just do it in the tute and then forget about it
  • problem booklet —> ??? procrastinate?

Prob:

  • notes –> swotvac
  • tutoral work –> in tute & swotvac

I guess, I thought I was going to do better at uni putting in more work for each subject, but in the end my clumsy messy semi-organised first-year methods were the best ones after all. Why change something that is not broken.

Acknowledging the cause of one’s stress is the first sign to solving it? I hope so.