Finally, the semester is over. The late night study sessions have ended, my body is once again more blood than caffeine, and my weekly breakdowns about the future have ceased (for the most part). As soon as the last bubble was filled in on my last final, I was ecstatic to hit the interstate and think about nothing but Netflix and my cats for a few days. Then came final grades… and then the tears. My grades weren’t awful, and honestly I feel a little ridiculous being upset when there are people out there who don’t even have the opportunity to go to college, but there’s still something downright depressing about basically moving into the library for the last month of school and reading a textbook for so long you think your eyes are going to start bleeding, and still coming up empty-handed. It sucks. It sucks, and there’s no way around that.
So I read my final grades like a death sentence, and went from watching Netflix happily to watching Netflix stressfully. All I could think about was how my GPA was “ruined.” For some reason, I had the idea in my mind that this small scale of numbers somehow held my entire identity. Where most people saw a decimal between the numbers, I saw the words “failure,” “lazy,” and “how are you going to get a job with that?”
This probably seems nothing if not extreme to most people, but I grew up in a home where college was never a question. For the record, you can definitely be extremely successful without college, but for the first 18 years of my life, I was conditioned to believe that to be happy, you needed to get a good job, and to get a good job, you need to get into a good college, and to get into a good college, you need to have a good GPA. So basically I went through the first quarter of my life thinking that my GPA determined whether I was going to be happy or suffer in misery for the rest of my life. Lovely.
I tried my best to push these thoughts out of my head and focus harder on my episode of "House Hunters: Tiny Houses." Then it hit me. I was sitting there in my bedroom, surrounded by my fur babies. I had plans with my friends later that night. My boyfriend and I were planning our first vacation together. Guess what? Those were the exact same things I was doing yesterday. I would be doing those exact things if I had a perfect 4.0. As much I didn’t want to admit it, for the first time in my life I realized that maybe my GPA didn’t matter as much as I thought I did.
I guess in a sense I always knew that. Theoretically, one "B" or "C" did not have the power to throw the earth off its axis and life would probably go on as normal, but I couldn’t help but think “If I failed at this, what else would I fail at?” but as I sat there in my moment of epiphany I thought why don’t I ever do that with positive things? Why don’t I ever think, “Wow, if I did this, what else can I do?” College is a special kind of hell. Instead of fire and brimstone, there are 8 a.m. classes and finals worth 20 percent of your grade. If I can write a 12-page paper in one night and take a foreign language from a professor who doesn’t speak English, then the way I see it, I can do pretty much anything.
Besides, being a student is a pretty huge part of my life, but that’s not all I am. I am a writer and a dancer and an obnoxiously loud laugher. I’m a might-as-well-be-professional Netflix watcher and an extreme lover of all things Disney. I know exactly the right things to say to my best friend when she’s upset, and I have mastered making my boyfriend laugh with some lame pun. These are the important things. These are the things that determine my happiness, not some number on a transcript that won’t make any difference two years from now.
Of course I’ll keep studying, and I’m not going to throw away my educational career over one questionable grade, but I am going to stop worrying. I’m going to put down the books occasionally and have a picnic at the lake or go eat lunch with a friend I haven’t seen in months, or just walk around downtown and revel in how lucky I am to be here. I can finally just be happy, and that makes “ruining” my GPA all worth it.
