#overacheiver

“I’ve always been a people pleaser and an overachiever. So I have a very high standard for myself and others. Which can be problematic at times, I’m not gonna lie.”

Okay. After a mini hiatus, I’m back with an update on what’s happened. This is a long, honest and raw reflection on what’s happened since my last personal post.

So, just before my last big test I was hit with a bout of burnout and couldn’t for the life of me focus on the work in front of me. Nothing could motivate me, nobody could help me (mostly because I hid it from everyone); I was just staring at the work and nothing was going in. Well I wrote the test and did badly, bad enough that I wasn’t exempted from the exam and had to stay a week longer to write. I mean this wasn’t bad, what hurt was watching all my friends celebrate that they had promoted/exempted and knowing that they all expected me to be with them but I wasn’t. I felt like such an imposter in that I didn’t desereve to there (I know now that that’s not the case).

After the big block test I decided to go home and try to recover from the burnout. It worked. I spent that week after the big block test resting and preparing to write another test for Sepedi in which I did well (I got a distinction) but I didn’t feel that it was right to be proud of myself because of what happened to the block test. So I continued without celebration. After that for two weeks we had an Intro to Pharmacology module-thing which was very hard for me to grasp and it was just a cycle of lectures, studying and sleep. After those two weeks we wrote a test and I did well enough to exempt/promote the pharmacology block. Still I didn’t allow myself to dwell on the success because all my friends were able to do what I did and still pass block. A week later of useless lectures, my first year of university was ‘over’. I decided to move out and back home immediately so that I could prep for my exam. A week after that I wrote the exam and was officially done with my first year.

The reason that I wrote this whole thing is because I don’t want to erase my experience and just chalk up my not doing well to a tough paper. I want to show that burnout is a real and serious thing and that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself because you didn’t achieve your goals in the manner in which you wanted to. It’s still really hard for me not to consider myself a disappointment, I’ll completely breakdown if I don’t get something right from the first attempt. I’m trying to do better and not be too hard on myself but having grown up as an overachiever it’s tough.

Anyways thanks for reading this, I’m officially on holiday for just over two months. If you have any suggestions on what I could do in that time please let me know. Here’s a picture of our garden with pretty clouds and one of the neighbours houses.