Amy Than

It’s come to my attention that as my education bleeds into my personal life, I’m putting off studying closer and closer to exam day. The way I study is overkill to many but I’ve always preferred to go over all the material once passively, a second time for making a visual map of all the information, then a third time for consolidation. The sooner I have my visual map, the more time I’ll have to consolidate. In high school, it’d be a a week or two before the exam. In undergrad, a weekend. Now in graduate school, I still have 1 lecture to review and make a map for before I can consolidate. It’s 12:30 am and the exam is tomorrow at 10am. High school me would never… But why am I writing this? There’s a deeper layer to these haphazard thoughts disguising my procrastination to finish the material before letting myself get some sleep. I wouldn’t be cutting it this close in terms of my self-prescribed study regime if not for a series of quite meaningful events. Last night, there was a social media frenzy regarding over 300 disturbing youtube videos and a 800 page manifesto posted by an ex-philosophy post-doc outlining their premeditation of a mass shooting at my university. 3 hours of frantic communications with my peers to draft emails to our professors asking them to have today’s lecture virtually, 1 hour of compulsively watching those videos and reading reddit forums of speculations, and another hour on tiktok before I went to bed. In the moment, tiktok felt the most out of character. So yesterday night, that’s the main reason for my studying plans getting pushed closer to tomorrow. Today, though.. I got a lot done. It was a successful, productive day. I went through 3 weeks of materials and got some work done for my lab rotation and part-time job with all the time I had at home, not having to commute or walk to and from destinations at school which ended up closing for the day. Sounds great except It’s extra time I didn’t need and used poorly. If there had not been a traumatic threat, I’d be going to class and work then home by dinner. I rarely brought work home. If there had not been a traumatic threat, I wouldn’t have made my sister and mom feel guilty for bickering too loudly as I took my work meeting. If there had not been a traumatic threat, I wouldn’t have reviewed one more lecture instead of eating lunch. If there had not been a traumatic event, I wouldn’t have scolded my dad for knocking on my door playfully as I was in a zoom lecture. If there had not been a traumatic event, I wouldn’t have missed my boyfriend’s call during his lunch break and found out earlier he was feeling angry and emotional about something I could’ve helped him figure out.

Besides TikTok doom scrolling, picking out the bad parts of my day is also out of character for me. I felt it was important to put into words, though. The way one single event can feel like the cause of a series of unfortunate events. Maybe it is to blame for the way my day got uprooted and mixed into matters that wouldn’t have elicited a reaction from me on any other day. Maybe I really needed yesterday night to study and I should just call it a day and do visual maps tomorrow before the exam.

These feelings of grief for the time and control I had lost today remind me that my life is too short to be spending so much time preparing for exams that I likely will not remember half the content for. The time I’ve spent studying this week should have had equal, if not higher priority for myself, my family, and my boyfriend. I dislike the fact that many hours have been stolen from me but it’s no logner there for me to steal it back. It’s fair that I bombarded myself with a full work day at home to reclaim a sense of control. But today was not like any other day and my days do not have as many hours to study as they did in high school and undergrad. It’s strange to realize that I too often put my love for school over my love for life. Today was a day to be alive and present for those I love. I missed out big time but never again.