It’s past midnight, and I’m looking over my seemingly insurmountable to-do list for tomorrow. College 2.0 is nothing like it was the first time around.
I can’t help but wondering what my academic breaking point is. Boasting an academic record that, at times, resembled something akin to a nerdy equivalent of a World’s Strongest Man contest track record, I feel ashamed to admit how oppressive this measly load of 7 hours feels. Two tests in two days, both of which my professors have said, “this is the easiest test you’ll face all semester.” It doesn’t feel easy this time. Not when I have a husband, a dog, a full-time job, 5 loads of laundry pending and every single dish I own sitting on the kitchen counter with the week’s food morphing itself into a solid impenetrable substance. Is this how I’m going to spend half of my year? Juggling two classes, neither of which I am interested in nor gifted in, wishing that I was doing something else? Anything else? Ironing? Doing dishes? Carrying the washing machine up and down the staircase? Anything?
“Are you excited about starting school?” A friend asked me that question today while we were sitting at lunch together–a lunch that was ill-advised in reference to my schedule, but highly recommended on the part of my sanity. I thought, “STARTING SCHOOL??? What the hell am I doing right now if I haven’t even started yet?!” She wasn’t talking about this preliminary stage I’m in, this trial run, this qualifying round. She was talking about nursing school, which is the dream, the goal of this tedious balancing act that I’m currently attempting. After I came to my senses, I told her that yes. I am excited about school. I’m excited about the idea of only having one thing to do.
Foolish, right? What about me truly believes that I am only going to have one thing to do once I start the Accelerated Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing degree program that I am working towards? The stupid part. Even when I start nursing school–the program for which they purposefully don’t admit students who have children because they (and I quote), “don’t want to be responsible for the level of neglect that the program demands”–I will still have a husband, a family, friends, a house, a dog, a cat, and dishes, all of which will still demand my attention. And I will want to give them that attention. I’ll have even less to give, though. I’d imagine that learning how to care for people in that capacity is a bit more complicated than studying for a Microbiology test and a Chemistry test in two successive days.
And so it’s nights like these. Nights when I am up after midnight, nights when I’ve made poor time management decisions all day long, nights when the total of ‘hours left in the weekend’ are noticeably smaller than ‘hours needed to accomplish what I need to accomplish’. These are the nights that leave me thinking that I’m not ready, not able, and maybe not willing to make the sacrifices that I need to make in order to achieve my goals. I’ll feel better in the morning, and maybe better still on Monday, after I have reviewed for my exams and perhaps have memorized all the Elements and Ions and Compounds that I have to memorize. Perhaps after I can differentiate between the Genus and the species and after I’ve memorized Whittaker’s 5 kingdom system I’ll come back to you and proudly declare that I once again have confidence in myself and my scientific abilities. But for now, I’m going to crawl into bed and recite to myself the 8 parts of speech and murmur under my breath in what Spanish I can remember, remembering that I must have felt this way in College 1.0, I must have, and then I’ll remind myself of how I survived.
-sarahthe
