Why I Need a 4.0 ...

... and why I can still do better.

I am going to preface this post with the following message:

This is not a dig for compliments. This is not a plea for people to reassure me. I don't want any of that. These are my actual feelings and the way my brain works. Throwing out compliments or reassuring me is a way to debase my feelings--an underhanded way to tell me that I am wrong and I shouldn't feel this way and I need to get over it.

So yeah, don't do that.

This is just an explanation, so people can understand me a little bit more.

I got a 4.0 this last semester. Finally. My first one in my masters degree. A big deal or so people assume, but to me, it is what I expect of myself. A 4.0 means I can't be any better. It is the top of the measuring stick when it comes to school.

I can't be any better. But then I think back to all the times that I procrastinated this paper or didn't read that article or should have been working on something but instead I was playing facebook games. And I can be better. I wasn't good enough. I did not do my best. It's really hard for me not to judge myself based on grades (that's a whole different blog post about how we're trained and taught toward the grade). But it isn't just grades. It's just that now that I am in school going toward this degree, that is what it is focused on.

Anything and everything I do is done with the idea that I could have and should have done better. These feelings come from always feeling mediocre when I was younger. Nothing I ever did was good enough, and I was never good enough at any one thing to be great. I could and still can do a lot of things, but I am always stuck in the potential phase. "You have great potential." I got really tired hearing that. I also got really tired of hearing "You could do better," or "Your best isn't good enough," or "Why can't you be more like your sister?" (which my mom doesn't ever remember saying to me, but she did, but not nearly as often as someone else).

My first semester of graduate school, I got a 3.455 - and people praised me. "You did so good for your first semester. That's really really good."

And I'm screaming in my head ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I GOT TWO Bs!!!

My second semester I got a 3.79. Much, much better. Just one stupid B+ in a class that I didn't want to take but had to take anyway. The worst part though is that it was the class I tried my hardest in. Just wasn't good enough.

This semester, yes, I got a 4.0. My overall average is now at a 3.739 (which lets me breathe a bit easier), but I had an easy semester. I only had 2 classes and a few hours of an internship that wasn't nearly as much work as I was expecting. So the work load was less, and my grades were higher, which makes me feel even worse.

Next semester, I have less school work and more real life work, work that won't give me a grade. I have one class (which I'm excited to take) and my Masters Project that I have to complete. I have a 10-hour-a-week internship with Utah Symphony and Opera, I have copy editing with SLUG magazine, I have 8-10 hours a week at Guadalupe School. I'm going to be busy and I am going to love being busy.

But the entire time, with every thing I have to do, I am going to be thinking that I can do it better. I can be better. But can I really? That is the worst part. The self-doubt. Because even when I do my best, I feel that it is not good enough. And without a grade to tell me how well I'm doing, without a grade to tell me that I can't do any better, then I am always going to think that I am not good enough. And that is why I need a 4.0.

So, I don't know if that worked. I don't know if I managed to explain myself, but if you give me a compliment, if you tell me "oh you're so smart" and I look away or mumble something about being better, try not to be offended. I'm working really hard on accepting compliments by just saying "thank you" and not contradicting the complimenter. But in my mind, I need to learn to accept them, too, and know that they are true. In my mind, the compliments are not true. I battle with this almost every day. I don't believe them. I am smart, but I can always be smarter. I do my work and meet my deadline, but I can always work harder. I am mediocre. I can always do better.

My New Year's resolution is to work on this. To be better.