Shiny New Ramblings …
Posted by Olivia | Posted in Thoughts | Posted on 05-05-2010
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Hey, an update, and only 3-ish months after the last one! My blog silence is basically due to me having run around like an over-caffeinated, efficiency-obsessed psycho for the bulk of this semester, madly juggling 5 classes, an internship, a work-study job, and Aikido, because I am a masochist and like signing up to do too much cool stuff all at once.
Anyway, in my grand end-of-semester tradition of justifying my expensive, over-scheduled school existence with a recounting of what I feel I gained from said semester, here are some things I learned this semester, aside from the in-class intellectual stimulation (hey, did you know that conjugating verbs is a torturous experience? Yeah, it really is, and I voluntarily got up on Friday mornings to do it in Arabic all semester). In no particular order …
Everybody’s balance is different. For some people, having a happy, balanced life probably means not piling on as much stuff as I tend to in mine. I, however, like having a lot to do. As long as I get the occasional few hours to myself, and I know that I’ll get a vacation eventually (hello summer!), I can handle a lot and still be pretty happy. That does, however, come with the caveat that if I ever stop liking what I’m doing, this whole thing is totally going to crash, because it’s too much pressure to have the actual work become sucky without my happiness taking a nosedive. Speaking of me being happy:
Everybody’s idea of “happy” is also pretty different. I spend most of my life doing things which basically qualify as resume builders, which is fine, but I reserve the right to do whatever the hell I want with the rest of my time. Which means that I may, in fact, do a few things which everybody else would consider somewhat ill-advised, or at least unproductive. Since my life choices tend to be pretty well accepted by my social circle, that’s not usually a battle I have to fight, but I know that everything will not always work out that nicely. I’m not trying to be selfish, or step on any toes, but I’m learning that sometimes I just need to do what I think will make me happy, even when that’s not something that will go on my resume or make me more popular. Sometimes I’m just going to go chase my own happiness and see where I end up.
It’s OK to mess up. OK, definitely still working on this. I tend to go for perfect—I like my 4.0 GPA and my perfect attendance, those things make me feel good about myself. But those things can’t define me. Sometimes I’m lazy or bitchy or irritated, sometimes I care too much about the wrong things and not enough about the right things. Sometimes I don’t even know what the right and wrong things are. And sometimes I need to get myself back in line and get back to living up to my (often insanely high) personal standards, but sometimes I just need to cut myself a freaking break, let things go a little wrong, and move on, minus the self-guilt trip.
All of this is not meant to imply that I’ve in any way had an unsuccessful three months—I’ve actually really enjoyed this semester, and I accomplished some things which I am very proud of. I think I’m just learning to take slightly better care of myself, because the craziness of this semester has meant that I have had even less room than usual for unneeded freak-outs, and for not tending to my own needs when necessary. So yeah, yay college-spurred personal development and all that, endless thank yous to the family for picking up (most of) the tab, and I’m excited for the summer! I’ll still be having this interesting little personal development dialogue with myself over the break, just, you know, after 10 AM













