giving up and growing up
first half of third year is done
First of all, happy American thanksgiving to all my American Otters!!!
Second of all, can we talk about why the HELL my last post get six likes in 24 hours?! Someone explain. It makes no sense.
Like, I know six likes doesn’t sound like a lot per se, but this Substack isn’t really all that big. I only have two other posts with more than six likes—a Significant Otters feature and my My Chemical Romance essay—and I’m not gonna lie, those are actually good, well-written posts! The one I sent you on Monday or Tuesday or whatever it was, that was dashed off in an hour or two. Nothing really all that redeeming about it. Maybe y’all are just super into checking your emails at 3pm eastern standard time? That’s my theory. So I’ve sent this post out around 3pm to see if anything happens.
ANYWAYS. Enough about stats and numbers. I make despising math a decent fraction of my personality.
I was telling you last time about the 3.6 exciting things that happened to me in the last little bit, and now I get to tell you about school!!!! I know you’re all eager to know what’s happening and will totally not fall asleep reading this.
I have ten thousand things due in the next little bit, which is pretty customary this time of year. I have to catch up on tasks for my new part-time job (website manager for this lab that a U of T kinesiology prof runs). I have to send a bunch of applications out for a bunch of miscellaneous committees and volunteer and part-time and advisory things, and those are due on various dates. I would also love to submit some fire new poems to a bunch of litmag open calls and contests, which I haven’t done in a looooooong time.
But of course school comes first, as much as I wish it came last. It turns out third year is harder than second year, and I thought second year was hard as hell.
I had to write of my uni deadlines down the other day because my brain was spinning and I needed to prioritize…
a 3,000 word case study (gulp) for my urban politics class, which is probably going to take me a thousand years to finish;
a writeup on the play I saw the other day for that very same urban politics class (should be like 400 words tops, I am gonna write it after I finish writing this post);
a second draft of the truly horrendous 3,000 word short story I was forced to write for my introduction to creative writing class;
the final portfolio for my creative writing class, consisting of final drafts of:
a poem
the aforementioned short story
a stupid three-page dialogue scene thing
a 1,500 word essay I haven’t written yet
oh yeah and then I have the final exam for my European politics course, which is going to involve a crazy ton of note-taking, PowerPoint annotating, and 60-page book chapter reading… but I am gonna start worrying about that next week, once I somehow manage to get all of the above handed in.
I had another course on Canadian federalism, but I dropped it a few weeks ago, on the last day you could possibly drop a course without it appearing on your transcript. This is not something I ever envisioned would happen but I had to do it. It pained me to, though. I felt guilty as hell. I felt like a failure.
My decision was a combination of two things. The first was borderline nonsensical fear over my nothing-special GPA, and by extension grad school and admissions people looking at your grades and all that (not that I have any idea of if I’ll even go to grad school).
The other thing was just a lack of effort and also knowledge. I had bombed the midterm for the course—a friend told me the average score was a 72, and I was… well below that. And on top of that you had to write a 3,000 word research paper for said course, and I could barely bring myself to start it, let alone finish it. I had been given all of reading week to get a head start on things instead of cramming it all in within a couple days, and I just did not want to think about that stupid goddamned research paper.
Honestly, there was nothing about this course I enjoyed, which sucked because I really thought I would enjoy it! It’s not that I’m not used to failure so much as I try very badly to resist it when I feel it coming.
It’s not like I’ll be hanging out with anyone anytime soon. At a place as academically intense and rigorous as UofT, you kinda have to put your head down and do the work this time of year. You can’t really get away with studying the night before. (I mean, I sure know people who can… I unfortunately am not one of those people.)
For someone who does not have a lot of friends or a hugely busy social life, that sorta thing reassures me. Everyone is on the grind these days. Everyone is busy. And, like, genuinely busy, and not just saying they’re busy as a stand-in excuse for them not actually wanting to hang out with you (which took me a thousand years to figure out growing up).
Once things get less frantic I would love to go to a holiday party or two (and I will be at someone’s New Year’s Eve party, no matter what it takes, but that is still a ways away from happening). I am already starting to think about 2025. I think it’s gonna be a big year for me. I have endured so many rough stretches mental health-wise that… I don’t know what I’m gonna do yet, I just know I want—need, maybe—to change things up. I feel like I’m on the precipice of something and I don’t know what that something is yet. But I will be searching for it nonetheless. Enjoy your weekend and see you Tuesday.