B's get Degrees

Truth bomb: I don't become more positive by reflecting on my seemingly inevitable trend towards negativity and kvetchery.

This is a bizarre paradox of therapy, for example: to be able to stop hurting myself over the things that make me angry, I had to feel like I had permission to be angry about them. Paying someone handsomely to listen to me recount the ways in which the world was effing my ess up, and had been since roughly the mid-eighties, has allowed me to feel validated enough that I can, occasionally, get over myself and focus on something other than my weight, my GPA, the status of my resume, and/or the response of those around me to any or all of the above.

I still bitch when I get a B, but since, no joke, the fourteen year old iteration of myself had to be reassured that said getting-of-Bs didn't constitute grounds for suicide, my feeling is that my therapist deserves the large amounts of money I've directed her way since moving to New York. (Perhaps you were under the impression that resolving problems that are actually non-issues could be done expediently; if so, I'd hazard a guess that you are not now and have never been "too fat to sit down".)

Anyway, I much preferred the identity I established about midway through high school, when I decided that grades were stupid and flung myself into the business of learning the things that interested me (and, less admirably, ignoring the things that didn't).

The approach was only partly right. To maintain my sense of self, I was sometimes (often) pretty overzealous and obnoxious in rejecting Things I Don't Care About. I was also fairly seriously mentally ill at that point -- possibly, though not certainly, more so than your average sixteen year old -- but if I missed a few opportunities because I was just too busy to turn in my chemistry homework on time, I needed, very much, to believe that grades did not matter, that learning was what mattered to me and that my sense of identity did not live or die according to my class standing.

And, for what was a pretty glorious half-decade, considering how sick I was in other respects, I basically did believe that, for better or for worse.

This needs to happen now, because my first Peds midterm is in less than a week, I still have a hundred-fifty pages left to read, and everyone around me is starting to unravel and stress.

I don't want another B+, because, since college, I've slid into a new, different identity in which nothing but perfect will do. But the thing about dealing in absolutes is that you either have to seek out some sort of external, "objective" measure of what constitutes perfect, or you have embrace the kind of myopia required to not only privilege your own standards and expectations, but to assert that these standards are absolute.

I'm not reading the rest of these chapters, or getting up at 4 to do it, because I want an A. Not really. Or, if I do, the part of me that wants that is the part I care about least -- the same part that wants to weigh 100 pounds forever, the part that would rather do what it's told than take responsibility for who I am, and value that person.

The A or B I get in Peds actually will not affect my nursing practice, and if I am studying in order to get an A, one might argue, I'm going into my nursing practice with a philosophy of care that is dominated by my need to feel good about my performance. This is poison.

I need to know about how to care for kids, so I'm going to study as much as I can in order to do that. If I do that, and don't do well -- well, with all due respect to SUNY Downstate and their thoughtful pedagogues (and if you know me, you know I almost never say this), the problem may not be with me this time.