I am very grateful to be in a small cohort in a school which is very selective of its students (only students who scored 7 above are allowed to do Chemistry at A-Level). Yet, it's given me such a reality check and has humbled my ego as someone who had revolved her identity around my academics for a majority of her life. At the same time, I feel that I am scaling my shortcomings out of proportion in comparison to the progress I am making. I instantly went from a D to an A between my first two chemistry exams. In all honestly, the D may have been a fluke, or maybe the second test was made easier as my teacher is aware that all my peers want to pursue highly competitive courses. Either way, I think I will just continue to revise how I do now.

Instead of passively making flashcards only to never use them again and watching videos hoping I magically memorise the content, I see that using past papers and actually using my flashcards works. (lol) Blurting is also something I have began to implement again, since it worked extremely well for me in the past. Why I stopped using it? I have no idea. Perhaps I felt it was "time-consuming" for my younger self.

The thing that has been weighing on me the most is how my boyfriend and I have such an intelligence gap, he is a straight A student and learns out of curiosity, making him more adaptable to the content at A-Level. He doesn't particularly understand why I struggle, as the content seems to be purely common sense to him. I tend to sometimes beat myself up over this, but I know it's not a dealbreaker for our relationship and he has expressed that he hopes to see my successes so I can achieve my dream of being a dentist. He wouldn't want to see me upset after a bad grade, so he encourages me in his own way.

Nonetheless, the only thing I can really do is to just ignore the fact that I am falling behind my peers in terms of understanding the content. I learn at my own pace, even if it means much slower than others. At GCSE, I consistently scored grade 5s (C) in maths and biology throughout the whole of secondary, even in the March mock exams before the real GCSEs. I was told I would never achieve above a 5, until I got 8s (A*) in both subjects on results day. This was not due to luck or chance, I did a past paper for maths everyday for 3 months and I revised for Biology the most out of all my subjects. Despite not being 9s, I was proud of my improvement.

I would like to remember this success so I can use it to fuel my current journey at A-Level. I might not see immediate progress, but showing up every day will count. I am about to start revising for Biology (Biological Molecules topic). If I put in the work for the next 12 days, I can be confident for my end of topic test.