In this case, 20th century assignments. I stayed up until after 4am on friday morning working on the concert report, and couldn't quite finish it, so I had to get up and attempt to get more work done before I left at 8:45 to go to the MYC teacher's brunch. Yes, I technically could have missed that, but mentally/emotionally, I NEEDED to go and meet with some of my fellow teachers. I didn't even finish it before I had to jet out, which was perhaps related to the 'getting less than 4 hours of sleep' part. I was pretty okay for a while, and the brunch was fine, although the first part I started to eat didn't feel amazing, but it got better.
One of my issues/character traits (however you want to look at it) is shyness in speaking up for myself and my own needs. Usually, the bills are brought to the table at the Canad Inns and I have taken to asking for them to be brought right away, just because the brunch is at 10am, and I have a class at 11:30 (fortunately, we meet at a Canad Inns VERY close to the University-just about 5-10 minutes on the bus). On friday, they didn't bring them, and I was in a state of mind where I couldn't ask (nerves about still having a bit of the concert report yet to do got to me). So, I ended up holding off for quite some time...otherwise known as after 12. Which meant that I was not going to 20th century class. This led to both a bit of relief in that I could get the last two short paragraphs down without guilt about not handing it in at the start of class (technically how our professor wants it), but then intense anxiety that it wouldn't be accepted, and I would lose 13.3% of my grade because I would be handing it in at about 1pm. I was feeling tired, a bit light-headed, EXTREMELY stressed to the point of wanting to cry, decently nauseous...one of my friends said I looked incredibly pale as well. So, it wasn't too much of a stretch to say that I was physically sick there. The stress was in turn worsened by the fact that I heard from my fellow classmates that they received their first assignment back, and because I had made a stupid mistake on my matrix (I labelled the rows 1-12 instead of 0-11), I was concerned that I was going to have done very badly. But, I managed to get the last little bit done and printed up and figured that I might as well head over to my professor's office to see if by chance she was there (even though it was not her regular office hours). Her office is in one of the additional music buildings, so I had to bundle up. I actually ran into her coming towards the main music building, so I got the assignment handed in, basically just said that I was unable to come to class (probably aided by looking so pale and not sounding great), no issues with that, and got back my first assignment.
So, here is the rule...I need to stop stressing so much about 20th century! One, my assignment was accepted with no issues, and two, the assignment I was so concerned about got a 90%. Oh, and three? I read in the course outline today that both the concert report and the composition assignment were only worth 5%. So, I worked myself into an absolute insane amount of stress over both for something worth only 5% of my grade. Talk about a waste of energy, and an oversurge of unnecessary cortisol and adrenalin.
I can laugh slightly at myself today over this, but I'm also seeing a very dangerous resurgence of perfectionist tendencies. I'm going to have to watch myself more closely...getting probably less than 8 hours of sleep over two nights, especially if something is going on (and knowing what lack of sleep may have contributed to in December) is NOT SMART. But, really, nobody said that book smarts = wisdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment