Remembering who the eff I am

So this period of my life is all about growth and change. It's annoying that I'm doing all this growth and change now, and not several years ago like most people, but that's what happens when you live at home in undergrad. You don't have any growing pains at 18, you get them whenever you move away and have to figure your life out on your own.  It's a lot harder than I expected. I took a lot of who I am and what I believe for granted.

Since I've been out here, I've adopted a "Yes Man" attitude and I just go along with things. Socializing almost every night (at least at first, before we had a crapton of work all the time)? Sure. Intramural Soccer? Why not? Make a website for the research project? Ok. Watch football? Yeah. I say yes now. These are all things I used to say no to, and while I'm glad I'm saying yes more, it's messing with my head. I'm becoming a different person. And I think I might like the person I am becoming, but I also kinda liked who I was before. I at least didn't dislike her. So it's disconcerting to think that she's going away to make room for this new, more easygoing? (no one who knows me here would call me easygoing, that's for sure) whatever I am.

And when I got my stats test back with a bad grade, I had this fatalistic freak out day. I cried. All day. On the phone with my parents in the quad, in the office with my roommate, on the most annoyingly bad service phone call with Bestie, all by myself writing an email to my undergrad advisor, I cried a lot. Big, heaving sobs. Stupid crocodile tears that refused to listen to reason, that didn't hear the "It's not so bad's" and the "You can recover from this's" and "You might be doing badly at the moment, but this is the first time you've ever been challenged in school and it's just taking some adjustment, it's not that you're too dumb to be here's". I seriously considered quitting. It's too hard to be here if I'm not going to hack it. I miss my friends and my family and good Mexican food and grid systems and getting enough sleep and watching TV and things being easy.

But then I woke up on Friday morning and thought to myself, "Self (oh, Mr. Evil WH teacher, how you still haunt me), what the eff. You are not a quitter. You are a hard worker. You are rise-to-the-bar-er. You do not let people tell you 'No'. You go after what you want. You make the best of things. You do not cry like a little bitch and take it. You make it work. Get your butt to school and figure it out".  And I did. I have a study group, and I'm going to office hours more often, and I'm changing the way I take notes, and I'm making it freaking work.

I might be growing and changing, and I might be being slapped in the face by assumptions that I held about myself, but I refuse to change some things. My stubbornness tenacity is one of my favorite things about myself, and I refuse to let that be beaten out of me taken from me.

Also, an official thank you to Mom and Dad, Bestie, Roommate, and Undergrad Advisor for talking me down from the ledge. I know it seemed like I wasn't listening to you and was actually pretty rude to you all when you tried to make me feel better, but I appreciate you. I came around eventually =)