Understanding Humanity

After reading Brynhilde's blog entry on learning and the transition from one level of proficiency to another, I cannot help but realize that this is a rather frightful echo of my high school days going into university as a biomedicine student, and an ominous prophecy for the future. Although I cannot say I have experienced the same things to the same extent as Bryn, I feel I am at least obligated to share mine. This is a deviation from the more detached questions I have asked in previous posts, and a reflection on myself brought about by a vision of tomorrow.

I was never an honors student in the ideal sense. My life in education was more or less riding the wave of instinct given to me by my father's tutelage, understanding that all knowledge was ultimately linked - and therefore knowable. Philosophy laid the grounds of my morality and understanding of humanity, science showed me the reductionist power I could redirect to learning isolated systems by simplifying them to known systems. I've always wanted power - because I have felt the pain of being powerless. I was never number one, but I always wanted to be.




But even if I was, I don't think I would have liked it very much.





After awakening to the world early in my teens, I became infinitely more self-criticizing. Where once I would have thrown someone to the ground without hesitation for hurting my brother, I suppressed them - analyzing the outcomes, calculating the ideal outcome, and ultimately collapsing into primal fury. This is the source of my pain, and yet somehow - inexplicably - the source of my intuitive intellect. In high school this stress wasn't that bad, stretching the time only because my only concern of the time was trying to learn to understand people - that is, "trying to understand human interaction to the extent that I would finally be able to stand within 2 meters of a girl without backing off in an attempt to give 'personal space'". Oh man that was embarrassing.

Although that mental breakdown from missing out on an undergraduate medical interview by one mark really really hurt.



I thought I would finally be able to experience life normally when reaching university. Boy was I wrong.


In first year I would call 3 different people, people I selected that had no connection to each other, to verify practical times and assessment due dates - not trusting the books I held on my person or the online learning materials, just to ease my nerves. I freaked out exponentially more as assessments started to arrive, sparked by the annoyingly persistent classmates that eventually converted me into a more depraved version of them. In second year it got worse - with my

80

First Class Honors

streak finally broken into shattered pieces the stress and insomnia struck with cosmological strength. I can't decide on a single thing, I keep wanting to learn but I keep wanting to find easy subject and score highly because if-i-don't-i'll-never-get-into-medical-school-and-it-seems-like-my-only-reason-to-push-forward-though-all-this-crap-and-lies-i-was-told-in-high-school. I want to SCREAM. All that stuff they told me in high school about university being easy? THAT'S ONLY IF YOU'RE IN AN ARTS DEGREE AND SIT IN CLASS HALF DRUNK YOU IDIOTS.




And the thought that this was only the tip of the iceberg? Unbearable.

Would I be able to take the stress of medical school? I don't know.




Sure, my cousin has mentioned in passing that biomedicine is probably more stressful than medicine itself, what with seeing the other 300 of us as rivals and enemies to be conquered (which I've alluded to in conversation repeatedly as "being at each other's necks all the time"), and that ball of stress that starts to expand in my gut every time I recieve an email in my University mail account or a classmate messages me on Facebook or you know, when I wake up every morning isn't going away any time soon.

So why is it that I could cope so much better with my education in my younger years than I could now?

I suppose it would be easy to say that it was because I didn't care about my grades then. And that would be true. But what if there was another reason?

What if all the stress that comes from moving into uni, or moving into the vanguard of the profession you've just recieved a degree in was all because of analysis? What if the answer isn't copying the frat kids and not thinking, but instead being confident in what you do? How often do you freak when you tell your friend information you know to be true?

What if it could all be better once you've found that fire, found that flow that makes everything as effortless as typing on a keyboard?



The only thing left would be to find it. Easier said than done - but if we could, that just may be the heaven we seek.







My apologies to Bryn if this post has made her uncomfortable in any way.