Gratitude and friendship
Posted: 08/11/2024
The past few weeks I've been doing my finals for my first year of university. Ordinarily, this is an incredibly stressful time, and I consider myself an incredibly unfaithful student when it comes to studying for exams; no matter what I do, I seem to give in to my subconscious and just do whatever else - my hobbies, cleaning up, talking over the internet - and do just the minimum amount of study, feeling in a constant state of anxiety before and after the fact. I'd still end out okay - it seems I have a gift for making things up on the spot, as one of my friends I met in law school once observed earlier in the year that I'd always make each exam out to be a certain failure only to perform admirably on it anyway.
Apart from that explanation - that I'm just good at improvisation - I'm not really sure why I always feel unprepared but pass fine. Well, I have failed end-of-year examinations before, but in those cases I was not particularly absorbed by the material in class. Maybe it was the teaching, or the subject matter? Is it that subjects like law just... stick and work better in my head than chemistry? Or is it because law is a more practical subject to apply in a written exam than high school chemistry and its organic reactions maps and equilibrium reaction schemes? In any case, for all the exams up to my finals, I felt like I was going to blunder through it all, and that feeling was dreadful.
This changed a few weeks ago. To be honest, I've never had a solid friend group, since I was always swapping primary schools or going in and out of boarding at high school. It was even worse at university, since lectures are prerecorded; many of my existing friends just ended up watching lectures at home instead of turning up (not to mention, sickness did take some of them out of action too). Although I was no longer living by myself like I was in the first semester, the second semester began to feel lonelier than the first.
But I've learned that there are people who are willing to give you a hand, even as strangers, if you strive to meet them at their halfway. I practically stumbled into into a group of friends this way; all it took was hello (and belatedly learning their names... I'm terrible with names...) Annoyingly enough, they had been there the whole semester and had tried to get to know me earlier, but I was in a darker time then and didn't notice.
Adversity is always an ordeal best shared, but I had never really followed through on this. If I ever did any study regimen, it was on an incredibly crazy pomodoro technique marathon where I'd plan the whole day out in 30 minute chunks. It would work for the first few hours, but the fatigue would set in, and then... nothing. I would go without meaningful human contact between the morning boarding-house roll-call until dinner time (especially if I missed lunch).
It turns out that human contact was the ingredient I was missing. My new friends invited me to study with them, and even if the study wasn't as strict as I had tried to impose upon myself in high school, it felt a hell of a lot more meaningful. For two weeks we talked with each other, asked questions, laughed and cried in our successes and failures... And honestly, it might have well been the most productive and satisfying weeks of my life. I never felt calmer before each exam; it was something extraordinary for me.
But nothing lasts forever. The exams ended, and now I feel oddly dejected. I mean, nobody wants more exams, but there was just something beautiful to me about our common struggle towards them, and how I was a part of that. And what's worse, I won't likely be in Christchurch in the next few years to enjoy finishing my degree with the friends I made. When we finally parted for the last time as a group on the Wednesday, I sat in my car with all the holes and weights in my stomach that I used to get before a high school exam, knowing that tomorrow, I wouldn't be able to go to university and find them crouched over their laptops to wave hello to me and extrapolate the effects of excessive consumption of Maltesers or make fun of the numerous movies I haven't watched. But I knew that without them, I would have been much worse off in those weeks of study. I would have been alone, with all the accumulated angst and anxiety and helplessness that comes with it. I might not be here.
I hope I can see some of them before I leave to America and Canada for the holidays, or in the time that I come back to Christchurch but before I move to Melbourne. But I've always been terrible at keeping up with my friends this way. I've never felt more afraid of losing people like this, either.
But... if nothing, I'll be forever gracious that I was able to be afforded the opportunity to study with such an amazing group of people... and I hope to meet their equals in Melbourne or wherever I go.
Benedykt