livin' is easy with eyes closed

These are the times, though, that the blinders need to come off and you need to take a look at the desolate carnage around you. How many things have you destroyed in your race to get to the top? How many people have you left behind because you couldn't stop?

This semester has been... pretty rocky. Like, think Mount Everest meets Mount Doom. I took on 18 credits (that's a full course load here at the University, we're not allowed to take any more than that)- and not just 18 credits, but those credits are all upper-level, kick-your-ass-and-run-you-over-and-expect-you-to-get-up-and-take-more classes. It's been really hard, and I'm not going to lie, I'm not doing very well at all, and only Finals will tell if I've passed all of them. Some I'm not worried about, I know I at least hold a C in, if not higher. Others, I'll praise God if I can scrape a C in. I'm not exactly proud of this... in fact, I'm not very proud of it at all. I'm accustomed to being the Honor-Roll student, the straight-A girl. But that was high school. Those standards are impossibly high here, especially in my field. At least in my opinion. Hey, if you're better at accounting than me, good for you. I'm trying my best here.

It's also pretty impossible to feel good about yourself with these kind of grades when everyone around you holds you to your Honor-Roll record and doesn't recognize that your own shame already degrades you more any more than their disappointment can. I don't suppose it helps that I can't just outright respond to grade inquiries without being preemptively defensive, because I don't need others' judgments to gouge more than my own self-reprimanding already has.

Through all of it, however, I have found inspiration through one of my best friends, my brother. When I get too down on myself he opens up and tells me that he's proud of me for being like THE first of our name to go to college, how happy it'd make him to see me graduate and get a "good, clean job." Whenever I want to throw in the towel and hit things, I can just look back at this text:

Youll be ok yer makin me proud at least for even bein up there tryin

Yeah, that sentence may not seem like much to you, but to me it means everything. Poor grammar, nonexistent punctuation and all. It means the world.

And it means I'm OK.