lonely hotel suite

last book i've read: Emotion: The Science of Sentiment by Dylan Evans
music currently caressing my ears: Zero 7's album Simple Things
general mood: rejuvenated
quote i just thought of: "Not all who wander are lost." --J. R. R. Tolkien

For the second time since being depressed, I finally have a grade on a midterm I can be proud of. For me, at least. It's a start. The hard work/effort actually shows in this one.... hope the trend continues. I hate to get my hopes up even a little just to be severely let down by myself/my grades.

I recently received the question: why are you so hard on yourself? God, where do I begin. Ever since coming to college, realizing what a poor excuse for an education I received at my high school, and somehow expecting myself to then perform at a level I wasn't ready for, these years have taken their toll on me. Let me ask, have you ever worked really hard at something, put your heart and soul into it, did the best you could, only to receive harsh feedback, a bad grade, a broken heart? That is what the last few years have been - a continual string of disappointments and lack of rewards for hardwork - while I see some of my peers not working as hard doing so much better than I. Listen, I'm not asking for A's, in fact, I'd be content if I could just get straight B's. But that certainly isn't the case for me.... you can imagine where I sit, I won't spell it out for you.

I have put a lot of pressure on myself to do well because this school puts a lot of pressure on us to do well. My parents don't expect perfection, so that's not the source, but it seems that any time I fall short of what I would consider well, I feel horrible about myself. In social psychology we are learning about how most people would make external attributions about their mistakes, such as they didn't study well, didn't get enough sleep, partied hard the night before an exam, etc. Nah, I skip all that and head right for the internal attributions: I blame myself for my failures. I hate that I can't do well enough for myself, therefore I berate myself, get depressed, and seem unable to get myself out of the hole. This is what I have been dealing with on a termly basis for the past two years.

If you need an even clearer picture of what I deal with here it is. Imagine an anorexic girl, clearly thin, perhaps even beautiful. Every day she looks in the mirror, she sees someone who is fat, ugly, less than perfect due to standards society puts on girls to be beautiful, which in this culture is thin. There is no amount of telling her she's thin or beautiful, she just sees the ugly person staring back at her. I am anorexic too, I starve for recognition for the effort I put into my work, but everytime I look in the mirror, I see a stupid girl who will never measure up to the standards set by this university. It's just how I see things. It's hard to turn something like this off, and I'm not sure I'll even feel entirely comfortable with myself academically.

I've been hating the system for a while now, and I've grown very cynical due to the way it's treated me.

Wayland says I should write in Spanish for my next blog.... now if only I really understood how to speak it. Ha! Pobrecita, quiere un momento de claridad.... solamente para tiempo corto.