By Emily Winters
As we near the end of the reading period and prepare ourselves to meet those last deadlines for papers or take those in-person final exams, life can feel ungracious. Overwhelming. The final boss battle is not that last exam at the end of a difficult day, a different week, a difficult semester, and maybe even a difficult year. The final boss battle is triumphing over our own will to give up.
This is usually the part where an article like this one tells you to “keep climbing,” or to “persevere.” The media, or our professors, or our parents, give us cat posters. They give us catch-phrases and aphorisms. But a lot of times, these things are just things. They are just words. How then, do we internalize all these good and kind notions? How do we translate them into motivation and motivation into action?
Unlike previous blog posts, this one won’t have a numbered list of how to succeed without trying (too) hard. Because, the truth of the matter in this instance - mastering the end of semester fatigue - is that you have to try. We have to try hard.
Personally, I remind myself that it will soon be over. There is the summer, after all, and hopefully, the opportunity to find balance again, and find ourselves. For others of us students, maybe there is never such an opportunity.
This time, for me at least and all the other graduating students, the end of the semester doesn’t feel like a reprieve. It feels like a long delayed ending of a first act, and what’s coming is up or down but it’s not neutral. And you know what? That can be exciting.
Sit with me a second, and let’s rearrange this scenario. Maybe the summer won’t bring us much deserved rest, but it will bring us opportunity. Graduation will bring us opportunity, and our final exams give us the key to those opportunities, whatever that might be. We could say too that final exams are your chance to prove to yourself that you know things - even if you don’t do well. Even if you don’t pass. You have now learned the outcome of your apprehensions. The act has an ending, whatever sort of ending that might be.
Sometimes, there isn’t clever advice to handle every situation. Sometimes, we have to do what we have to do and it sucks. But at least, in the end, we will prove something to ourselves. We will have answers. We will show that we have the answers, and through the difficult process of studying, writing, combusting, putting out the fire, then writing and studying some more, we will come out understanding new things about ourselves.
Consider this, then, that the greatest discovery and the greatest knowledge that you can learn in college isn’t differential equations or the intricacies of what sparked the Revolutionary War. It’s the exquisite complexities that make up our minds, our hearts, and those of our friends who either suffer with us or help lift us out of our haziest days (or both).
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When I was little, my dad used to read me this Sesame Street Golden Book called The Monster at the End of the Book. Throughout the book, Grover is frightened of the monster at the end of the book, because everyone told him there was a monster and so he keeps building walls and nailing up doors to avoid the inevitable.
It ends up that Grover is the monster at the end of the book. “And you were so SCARED,” he says when really, it was him that was scared all along.
They say that the only thing to fear is fear itself. Or maybe, the only thing to fear is our own apprehensions, our own brains’ interpretations of our abilities. There is real fear of what comes next, what comes at the end of the book. This we cannot control. We can control how we react and interact with the things around us and the tasks ahead.
So let’s be curious. Let’s triumph or let’s fail but let’s do it with dignity and determination and respect for ourselves. Let’s try hard. In the end, that’s really all we can do.
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