Not my worst day…

The pass list for my course at university was released last week and we now know our results, whether we will have to retake and if we will be proceeding to the next year. It was such a bittersweet moment as I was so pleased that I had done well but also so sad that many of my friends were unhappy. I find it really hard to feel joy when people I care about cannot share in it with me.

Throughout the years I have always found that very short periods of intense revision works for me and has led to my best performance. However, it is usually not a pretty process and during exam season I was an absolute mess – this is what happens when you give yourself two weeks to cover an entire year’s worth of work. I lived in the library on diet coke, haribos starmix and hungryhouse take outs.

I cannot believe it is only first year and does not even count. I wonder what I will be like when my results actually matter. My craziness even found its way onto “Spotted at Warwick”. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is a Gossip Girl style Facebook page where people send in funny things they witness around campus so I am now basically kind of a big deal (I joke) …

Amidst results coming out and many of my close friends and family going through other forms of their own difficulties, it is so easy to feel disillusioned with life. Life sucks sometimes. I was recently talking to a good friend who had failed an important exam and it made me feel so sad as we spent hours in the library together and he worked so hard and he deserved to do well. Sometimes I just cannot understand why certain things happen in life but he did say something that stunned me:

I just need to put this out there, he does not have suicidal tendencies, I guess it was just something impulsively said in a moment of despair. Nevertheless, it is something I want to discuss. Thinking back to the conversation and trying to console him, I wish I had told him about my ‘not my worst day’ epiphany. When you are upset this is not what you want to hear, but I feel like it is a really important message:

When things go wrong and bad things happen it so easy to get into that “I want to kill myself” mentality. However, it is important to remember that you have in the past and will in the future overcome so much more than whatever you are going through right now.

Last term at university, I had to deal with a rejection for a part in a musical that I really wanted and had worked very hard for. I auditioned, then I got the coveted call back, then I got a ‘no’. That was it, I could not talk my way out of it, I just had to deal with it. However, after some time I realised that this was not the first ‘no’ I had received and would definitely not be the last so I eventually picked myself back up again, stopped feeling sorry for myself and moved on.

I began my campaign to be the President of my course society and I won. Without that initial ‘failure’ I may not have had the same level of motivation to run successfully and looking back now doing a show during exam season may not have been the wisest choice for me considering how many exams I had and how last-minute I like to revise.

Likewise, my best friend just dropped out of university. If I am honest I have always been a little jealous at how things came so naturally to her. Then she dropped out. Her identity which had so long been forged by academia was questioned and she felt like she’d failed and let people down. However, this ‘failure’ has led to this amazing path leading to something so much better than she originally imagined.

 

Personally, what helps me is focusing on those in-between moments. That moment of serenity when everything is okay. This can be for a long time or just for a few minutes. I like to call that moment the “calm within the storm”.

The point I am trying to make, although not in the most concise way, is that the negatives can be used to create a positive.