I'm not OK

From the title of this blog, you're probably are wondering what's wrong with me. Obviously, if someone say that they're not OK, then you know that something's wrong with them. Yeah, I'm not OK, but nothing's wrong with. It's what's right with me.

If you've read my blog at least over the past two days, you'd see that I've been going through hell with all the school work I have to do. The pinnacle of that academic mountain was my very first midterm for the semester, for a course named Operations Research. Despite the fact that I am doing an undergraduate degree, this course is also a Masters course, meaning that the majority of the class are people who have already completed their degree and are currently employed as engineers, making the course appear all the more daunting.

Though the course content is simple enough, there is this one icky topic that always messes me up. The method to work out the problem in question is simple enough, but the question involves iterations, which means that you have to repeat the question over and over again, magnifying your chances for arithmetic errors ten-fold. I have never been able to work out an entire question without screwing it up before.

Like I said a couple posts ago, the class I'm in is really small, so last Friday, well all got together and decided to try some group studying. Somehow, I ended up being the one with the marker, writing on the whiteboard and explaining stuff. Not quite sure how that happened. But I was surprised that I could do just that. Explain. My studying had paid off. I knew what I was doing.

Today was the day of the examination. My friends and I spent the whole day doing last minute cramming and revision. I was feeling pretty good about knowing the course content, but still pretty nervous, because I knew I was liable to make a stupid mistake somewhere and screw up an entire question. When the paper came, I sat down and prayed and then got to work. That same icky question came, and I struggled through the seemingly endless iterations and the decimal answers that made feel that I was definitely doing something wrong. At the end of the exam, when everyone compared answers, I found that I had in fact gotten the answer correct!! You can't imagine the type of relief I felt!

As I left the classroom and made my way to the shuttle stop, a thought hit me. I didn't do well because of sheer luck. Yes, I did have God with me, but I realized that I did well because I studied. Those nights were sleep was a foreign thing all paid off. I could really do with feeling like this more often. I didn't just want to be OK. I wanted to be more that OK. I wanted to be the best.
So from now on, I'm not going to try to do the minimum I need to get by. I'm going to try to the most I can do without toppling over. Mediocrity isn't my still anymore. I'm not OK, and I've never been more happy to say that in my life.

We’re never going back to OK/We’re never going back to easy/We’re never going back to the way it was/We’re never going back to OK - From "Never Going Back to OK" by The Afters.