Being a student is like getting dressed up for a ball, waiting for the car to come pick you up while having an anxiety attack because you think you’re running late. While you patiently wait to begin your night, you wonder if the dance will be as amazing as you imagined, or whether you’ve romanticized the experience to the point that showing up is simply a formality.
All of our time spent in preparation for life makes one think if the results will be worth the effort exerted and sacrifices made. Between choosing what one should study, what an appropriate career would be, moreover, what would ultimately be fulfilling, students are easily overwhelmed. Fear sets in and a nagging voice surfaces, questioning whether you truly believe that your success is plausible.
Thus begins the cycle of trying to organize your day with the things you must do and those you want to do. It seems as though a balance is impossible to achieve, and something always suffers. Whether it is choosing to go and have a few drinks with friends instead of studying for a test, or spending the weekend writing a paper due on Monday, a certain amount of resentment builds and pessimism sets in.
As a result, choices and goals are reassessed with the mindset that all the work being done could potentially be pointless. Not everybody can be a CEO of a major company, a well-respected doctor or a Nobel Laureate. What is occurring is the classic fear of failure.
Some people believe that the fear of success is worse than that of failure. However, that cannot be true, because if people are to succeed, they simply continue learning what to do, what not to do, chain of command and more.
However, people can only endure rejection so many times before they feel they must let go of the dream, of the hope that they might be lucky enough to achieve their aspirations.
The fear of failure forces the capable into submission and speculation. We then resort to spending too much time focusing on shortcomings and the possibility that all the schooling and grueling work was done in vain.
We are a breed of pessimists and as such, we have a knack for justifying the abandonment of difficult tasks instead of forcing ourselves to find solutions.
It is true to say that we may spend a lifetime preparing to leap into a better tomorrow, and if it never comes it would have all been a waste. But we must ignore such thoughts and not look at the future we are fighting tooth and nail to achieve, but instead focus on how we can give ourselves a better today.
A today with less stress and more enjoyment that we can control requires letting go of fear and expectations. We should allow the inescapable future to bring what it may with the faith that we are doing all we can in the present to ensure our happiness both now and in the days to come.
The ball might be nothing like you had thought, it might be dull and colorless, with the Mamma Mia soundtrack in the background. But you won’t know until you get there, and when you do, you might be surprised to find that the lack of color delivered a nostalgic old film feel, and that the music was remixed to sound like jazz. The party wasn’t exactly how you had envisioned it, not the worst it could have been, instead, unpredictably perfect.
Sarah Al-Mullah is a junior journalism major and a weekly columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
