Resilience
As midterm season comes to a close, we’re faced with a tearing realization to confront our grades, a new wave of midterms, finals and ultimately: reality. Almost as a facade of hope, spring break marks the last true “break,” with the USC schedule creating a straight 45 days of instruction. While students, faculty and staff are excited to begin school on a new foundation and mindset – refreshed and rejuvenated – it also came with the idea of “Sunday scaries” to the max.
Although I am ecstatic and ready to go back to school, my schedule and the overall atmosphere of USC, I am equally scared to embark on the journey to finals. I’ve taken this break to really ponder on the little things that I need to fix like studying earlier and finding out ways of studying in general, but I can’t help but also think of the repercussions of failing.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the 1.5 semesters at USC and being a freshman in college, it’s that the feeling of failing is the key to growth and finding identity. Note here that I said that it is the FEELING, because in my eyes, one can never truly fail a task, test or assignment. We as students must reaffirm the foundation and standard of succeeding AND failing, and (though repetitive), we must remind ourselves that a grade is not an extension of ourselves nor a reflection of our identity. I think the college experience in general has always been a trial of hits and misses, with a lot of misses, but we must persevere with the hope to learn and grow from our setbacks. I know there's anxiety and uncertainty surrounding what will happen in the future, but facing the next 45 days of the semester day-by-day can bring forth more growth than one can possibly imagine.
Here are some reflections and memoirs I have left myself over this week to aid this growth:
The power to truly understand emotions lies in patience in your own understanding; trauma, hurt and the past can hurt, but healing begins with you.
Stop trying to put out fires for people who are addicted to the flames.
I'm still learning what it means to be less giving to other people, and to reciprocate the same energy to myself.
If you are wholeheartedly genuine, without any regard for another’s wants or judgment, you will attract people that deserve to be in your life.
Live hard, love harder.
A mental reset is needed despite any deadline or end goal; your mindset is dependent on your mental health.
We are always on the run to find the next part of our identities, the next person we can “evolve into,” but we must also recognize that we are the people that we have been chasing our whole lives – we should be proud of that in and of itself.
I know that I, along with each and every one of you reading this, belong here and in the places we are today because of the foundations we set into the world. And we will make our mark in our own way in beautiful failures.