Tag: studying

Coping with bad grades

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I’m here. Again, at the exact same position I was last year when I was grumbling about school, grades. As always, a semester has passed by resulting in all the traumas as the finals’ grades have been revealed and they are not to my expectation.

I feel lost, sad, disappointed, hopeless, upset, jealous,… The list of my feelings can go on and on with all the negative adjectives you could think of. I’m confused. I’m confused by myself and my life.

Let’s rewind back to the last semester in which I was full of energy and motivation to begin with. I set my goals and was so determined to achieve them. The roadmap I drew out was so clear. I confidently invested major on my studying. I worked extremely hard. And the finals came along. But eventually, all of my endeavors went zero.

“What did I do wrong?”

“Why nothing good can happen to me?”

I constantly doubt about my worthiness, whether I deserve anything good in life.

…

Hey, wait a minute.

Do the grades at school determine your grade of life?

More specifically, how do you measure happiness?

Look around. You have all the good things you need. You have your family who loves you unconditionally. You have your best friends who are always there for you. You have your lovely goofy pets. You have access to knowledge, to entertainment. You have house and food. You’re privileged already.

Humans are greedy. They never have enough of anything. They always want more. They never get satisfied about themselves. They only look at what they don’t own, which is massive, and feel bad without noticing the precious things they have. That makes them prone to negativity whenever facing failure.

Dear myself, failure is the tool to success. If it’s what you have at this moment, use it. It will lead you back to the right direction. Don’t let yourself be defeated by just a tiny failure. Your biggest goal is still waiting for you to achieve. So get yourself together, stand up straight and move forward.

…

And the talks between I and myself go on and on…

How I get depressed these days or any other day

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Yeah

Obviously, I’m gonna grumble about studying, grades and school stuff!

I mean, what else can I talk about when I’m still “sitting on the school’s chair” (ngồi trên ghế nhà trường), and being haunted by the idea that grade is the only measurement of how competent (incompetent) I am. So yes! I am ridiculously obsessed with achievements. I hate to admit this, honestly. Still, this is not what I should feel shameful about since what so-called “achievement obsession” is a common “disease” of most of the Vietnamese students in recent time. But again, this is also not what to feel proud of.

Anyways, get back to the story, this semester has been a disaster. I have been hit up with 2 Cs and there will be surely more. It was already painful to get a C itself. But then I started to compare myself to other fellows in the result list, the pain went doubled.

“I’m so stupid. I’m incompetent. I’m useless. I’m helpless. I can never be like my friends…”

Each time a C comes, I feel like a door has just slammed on my face. After that come disappointment, self-hatred, hopelessness, and depression. Things just get worse since the more Cs I get, the more doors keep slamming on my face until the whole world shut down and there are no more doors. I have no idea what I’ll turn out to be by that time.

Some people are prone to blame the exterior factors when the results don’t come out well. But I cannot do that. When it comes to failure, I look into myself first for the answer, simply because it makes perfect sense to me. The process always goes like this: I dig deep into my head, trying to remember what went wrong from the beginning, and when the memories return, they come along with negative thoughts. I’ll constantly blame myself for not hard-working enough, not capable enough.

Nevertheless, I luckily bear the thought of having a growth mindset, the term that says I should set my mind positive through failures. Thanks to this, I’m able to pick myself up and move on. I find it really struggling to remind myself of this while carrying too much of self-hate problem. However, it does work. My growth mindset and my self-hatred could get along together. This may seem paradoxical but in fact, not. The mindset says: “Every failure is a chance to learn and growth.” On the other hand, my dark side shouts: “You didn’t work hard enough! That’s why you fail!” So these two somehow push me forward and put me in the position in which I torture myself at the same time.

I guess I should feel thankful for that dark side of mine as it didn’t shout the word “helpless”. This word could set my mind into “fixed”, which would only exacerbate my self-hatred and my academic transcript. If I place my capability into words like “fixed”, “limited”, I’ll be totally a deadwood. Though I do feel helpless most of the time but when it comes to studying, I try my best to exclude that thought.

In short, at the moment, I’m quite down but I’ll find a way…

P/S: Really surprised about how this note came out to be. I thought at the end I would write something awful or put my situation in a stalemate. But no, I made a way for it!