When I think about this next semester, I think about all the ways I could try harder to be perfect. Perhaps I could conjure up systems and rules for myself—maybe then I could trick myself into believing that my productivity is indeed a measure of my worth. I could dream up my existence in a perfect land, where all my to-do lists are perfectly checked off, I never buy something unnecessary at the grocery store, I manage to be on top of my readings always, and I never get frustrated when people do things in ways I might not.
It is safe to say this way of thinking has clearly exhausted me, and maybe it has exhausted you too. While I want to have perfect rough drafts and always have the right thing to say, I also don’t want to feel so overwhelmed that I can’t actually catch the brilliance and novelty of the things that I am learning. And above all these delightful and sometimes unrealistic whims of mine, I don’t want to burn out again.
Most semesters I have barely noticed the passing of time; I have been more caught up in trying to “get through” without noticing how my body is doing or where my mind is at. I forget to drink enough water and text people back. I always catch myself trying to type out lists that seem to promise perfection, to find some kind of immediate fix for the chronic overwhelm that tends to arise in week four when midterms are ominously encroaching. 
Usually, this is the point where I tell myself (with the exuberance of an early 2000s rom-com character, obviously), “Enough is enough. This year will be different.”
And it’s a nice thought that lasts me a whole thirty seconds before I realize that there’s a lot of things that contribute to the overwhelm that sometimes clouds my ability to actually be present in life.
This semester, I can afford to aim for good enough in my essay writing and how quickly I complete my assignments. Mentally, instead of trying to be 100% perfect every single day (gentle reminder to myself and you: this is impossible), I propose to be 1% more intentional every day.
Perhaps this is counterintuitive, but what I have already started to notice is how much more clearly I can think when I take this approach. I have all these impossibly high standards for myself, and I don’t think I am the only one—especially at Queen’s where it feels like everyone else has their life in tidy little boxes of perfection and I do not. It can be a daily fight to believe that you are actually meant to take up space on this campus too.
Reminding myself that I do not have to strive for some measure of impossibility that even all the brains that dreamed up AI cannot produce makes me feel more in touch with my humanity.
Instead of using up all my energy, all my brain space, and all my time dwelling on the notion that I am not ever going to be perfect (and feeling thrown by that), I am trying to aim for good enough.
Obviously, this is not for everyone and thinking like this might not feel feasible for your courseload, your discipline, your brain space, your lifestyle. It is a privilege for me to say this is something I am working towards right now. Your life isn’t mine, and mine isn’t yours, and it’s not supposed to be the same.
But I wonder how the mindset we use to approach academics, even how we talk about “doing school” actually can shift the way we think about doing things.
I am clearly a bit biased about mindset because I am a Psychology major, but I think it’s so vital to examine how the way we talk about things and how we think about them actually shifts how we do them. Instead of saying, “Ugh. I have more work to do,” I want to say, “I have more work to do.”
I’m not saying we have to be positive all the time. But what I am saying is that I am learning to be more mindful that how I talk about things impacts how my body and how my brain thinks about the task at hand as I am doing it. One of my favourite writers, George Eliot, puts it this way: “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
Perhaps that is what it is to be a student after all.
Cheers,
Hannah