"New" school

   Tomorrow, I start my second term of university, and like last term, I am taking only one course. I am kind of curious as to how things will turn out. Will I have learned from my procrastination mistakes from last term? Will I receive a better mark than last term due to more interest (this term I am taking a drawing course and as you may know, drawing is one of my more prominent skills.)? Will the length be bearable even though it will be around 3 hours long? Will I have more time for other things in life this time around, as my course will only be on Fridays? For most of these things, I'll just have to wait and see. But for one thing, I intend to make sure that I will make better use of my time this term than last term. If I get assigned an assignment (which I will), I will work on it as soon as possible, if not sooner than later. I think that will make things so much more easier than how things were last term.

   I think it will be safe to say that I will be doing some more growing this term in terms of becoming a more responsible person in general and also in terms of becoming a better artist. I think that this course will challenge me in both of these ways because from what I've heard about studio courses at university, they assign a lot of projects. This means a lot of practicing my skills as a drawer but also practicing time management.

   On a side note, if things will be better this term than the last, that wouldn't be a far cry from excellent in my opinion. This is because there were many times last term that I was considering quitting the course due to the fact that thought I wasn't doing so well. But in the end, I stuck with the course and I got surprised with a whopping 'B' for my final mark on the course. So if I did well at something I wasn't enjoying (namely writing essays) when I thought I wasn't doing well, how much more am I going to succeed at a subject that I enjoy and will be using to practice good time management with? Like I said before, I'll just have to wait and see.

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.