Today I took two exams and both went worse than expected. I felt immediate sadness, regret, and frustration with no one else besides myself. I thought about how this could ruin my nursing career, ruin my future, and everything in between. I then realized, how irrational am I being? This isn’t like middle school when my mom would be over my shoulder about my grades. But is it “trauma” from those times? Ever since high school began, there’s been less physical pressure to do well in school but the mental pressure has remained. And now, in college, I can feel it eating me alive. I’m so hard on myself. I momentarily base my worth off of how well I do on my exams. And when I catch myself in this depressive mindset, it’s hard to get myself out of it when it feels like everyone else has done well on the exams. But who’s expectations are these? My own? My family’s? Even though I know they’d be endlessly supportive of me?
There’s this immense guilt I feel when something like this happens, even though I know *for the most part* that I’ll be okay. Road bumps like this feel exacerbated by the fact that I’ve had an extremely tough week too. It feels like the universe out to get me or that mercury is still in retrograde. Except it feels like we’ve been retrograding ever since the semester began.
So, what can I do to stop feeling this way and being so hard on myself? I’m not quite sure yet but writing this has helped a little bit. I think also distracting myself from my frustrations will definitely help. And I need to constantly remind myself that my worth is not determined by a grade I get on an exam. This exam won’t even matter to me in a month from now (hopefully). I’m going to keep pushing myself to remember this.
