Blog #12 - Madeleine Perko

Another week, another late post. Thank you for your continued interest in my quarantine journey. This weeks edition will be more positive… though clearly I am still not on top of my game, (hence the belated submission). It is Thursday and this week I have been feeling feeling far more like myself. The crazy in my body has settled, the crazy in my mind as found a nice place to rest in the back corner (lets be real its never really gone, just sleepy), and the school work that has been piling high during this time of chaos, though still crackhead, now feels manageable.

I am relieved school will be over soon for a host of reasons. First, as I have mentioned in a past post, I am looking forward to seeing what being bored really does to me. I have seen better memes in the past month than all my years on social media combined (in fairness I haven’t had much of a presence on these platforms until recently). Regardless, I think boredom is a gift and, despite the warnings I get from my friends who do not have the workload I have, I am excited and ready to ooze childlike creativity. Second… I realize I don’t have a second… I was going to say that it will be nice to reset after being so overwhelmed. In the last two weeks I have been so busy catching up with all my work that I didn’t make it to many of my classes. In not going to my classes, I was falling behind in effort to catch up. This unfortunate experience has highlighted what I already knew. There is a reason we are supposed to go to class… I actually learn a lot there. As I tried to efficiently make up for lost time, I tried to take shortcuts by watching only select recordings and piecing information together in other ways. This was not something I enjoyed. I feel that a lot of the information I learned was surface level. I got to a place where I could regurgitate information or a series of equations if I was able to recognize a common theme, but I was am going through the motions more than I would like to admit. That said I am very proud of how I did given the circumstances and have learned a lot about myself in the process. 1. (and yes this time there really will be a part 2) I have always felt that I learned as follows… 

I would go into a topic with a basic, vague understanding, then as I would learn more, the foundation of my knowledge would shift. The more I learned the more I realized my assumptions were quite variable and there was more to a phenomenon that met the eye. I would seek more and more information in order to answer all of these, in my opinion, essential facts. When I finally got the final piece, my understanding sky rocketed. It wasn’t a trend such that each piece of information added to a linear progression of knowledge attainment, but each piece was eventually key for my final understanding. That is why I do not like cutting corners. I genuinely have tried to fake it till I make it…. Nope. Not for me. No. It is not a fulfilling path to be on. I can take it if absolutely necessarily, but the best course of action for myself is to just do it right the first time (not that I didn’t try, but you know, life happens). Whichhh brings me to my second point. 2. there is no such thing as a reset. I am not going to be able to go back and attain the information I missed as if I traveled back in time. Yes, I can review the recordings, but it will not be the same as going back in time. AND, that is okay. This is not the first time and not the last time I will wish I could go back. It feels like I have huge gaps in my knowledge, but I know more than I give myself credit for, and this is a fact of life. You don’t really reset, you just go onto the next.