FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL

My first day in business school started on an extremely low note and I couldn’t have felt more out of place and completely lost. I resumed a little later than most of my class, so I was not there for orientation, introduction and any of those sessions that help you ease into a new environment.  A few Lectures had happened, and a few classmates had already begun to bond, so I should have expected to feel a little lost especially as a chronic overthinker.

I spent the first half of the class reconsidering my life’s choices and pondering on my decision to enrol even after all I had heard how tasking and time consuming the program was. I seriously began to question myself.

“Is this really for me?”  

“What exactly am I trying to acquire this degree for?”

“Is this really worth it?”  

“Does it even make sense?”

“No one is paying for this degree for me so I am not answerable to anyone, why would I be paying to put myself through this stress?”

“If I drop out now, what difference would it make in my life?”

After being at this internal battle for about 30mins, I realised my thinking and wallowing in self-recrimination meant I hadn’t been paying adequate attention to the class, which meant that.

1. I was now actually attending a class after missing some, but I was not truly present.
2. We were halfway through this class, and I had no idea what the class was about, I didn’t know the name of the course, the topic for the day, the lecturer’s name’, absolutely nothing!

 Of course, that brought on a new wave of panic, that set me scrambling to get all the necessary information, a few which I may add had been sent to me prior to the commencement of the lectures for the day. Then at the same time I had to follow the class and participate.

As you may imagine that was a disaster, but during the last 30mins of the class I realised, “wait this is not so bad”, “I understand this concept”, “it is not completely foreign”, “this is Practically what I see every time financials and balance sheets are presented at work”, “oh, this is the back end of those reports”, “interesting”. Then of course I started to feel a bit more confident, “maybe I can do this after all”, “it is not so bad,” “it makes sense”.

But this is kind of like how life is in general isn’t it, we overthink the little things, imagine non-existent or sometimes existent issues, over magnify these issues in our head, put roadblocks in our minds that then become actual roadblocks on our paths and then little issues suddenly become big problems and big problems become a disaster. If only we would just breathe, slow down, and think through challenging situations and chart a path to the solution, live a little and allow things beyond our control play out, perhaps the world will be a much simpler and happier place.