Round Two

            In a couple months, I plan to register for university again. It’ll be round two, two years after my first crack at the bat. Hopefully it will be different this time. I hope that I will be able to focus much easier and retain as much as possible, all the while having more of a life-balance between studies and leisure. In the past, I’ve found that retaining as much as possible meant reading what I had to read at a slower pace. I think that somehow I’m going to have to change that and find a better way of retaining things in order to have more of a balance this time. But one way I know for sure that will give me more time for other things is that this time I am taking fewer courses. This time around, I’m only taking one course per term. It may not seem like much, I know, however last time I was taking 2 courses and I fell behind, making it too stressful to keep up. Thus I had to drop my courses and get an Authorized Withdrawal (AW) so that the courses I was taking wouldn’t affect my GPA or appear on my transcript.

            So taking just one course will not only will help me out by giving me more time for other things, it will also help me out by presenting me with less stress. This factor is an important thing for everyone, but even more so for me because I have schizophrenia. Too much stress is not good at all for someone with schizophrenia. I not only know this because I’ve been told so, but also because I have experienced it first hand. It happened last time I was in university. When I was experiencing the overload of stress that I was, my mental health started going downhill, and fast. This in turn triggered a relapse. At the time, I was lucky enough to have a psychiatrist to tell me that I had indeed gone through a relapse and to tell me that I should drop my classes. Following through with what he recommended was the first step to getting back to where I was before. But the reason why I was so lucky to have a psychiatrist say these things to me is because had I kept going in the direction I was going, I would eventually had reached a point where I would not be able to get my mental health back to where it was before I got sick. Maybe close, but not all the way.

            Thus this time around will be a chance to prove myself: to prove myself that I can do it; to prove myself that I can do better than last time. And to prove myself again that I can get back on track after some trouble regarding my mental health. In the end, it’ll be like a new beginning.