Delusion-Elle

"It's been a while."

I feel like I've started many a blog post with those 4 words given how many times I go on hiatus. Well, I'm not guaranteeing that I will be back on here for long; I'm procrastinating right now and I'm not really in the mood for studying.

Let's just say that life is good. Sure, I may have failed the last final exam I had, resulting in possible failure of the course, but I know that I can bounce back. I can and will survive whatever school tosses at me. Heck, I am going to survive whatever life throws at me. Except death, I suppose.

It's been a good number of months since my last post. I suppose that I can recap the past term.

School has been... killer. Let it be known: never take 4 CPSC courses concurrently! It is absolute murder. The thing about CPSC courses is that each assignment takes an ungodly amount of time to do. And unlike with a lot of other subjects, ones that involve coding in particular have no foreseeable end sometimes. This is something that I don't think a lot of people outside of the field understand unless they are in close contact with a CS student. You write your code and logically it makes sense to you, your peers, your TA, and your prof. But then you find a bug and upon fixing that one, you find another. And this goes on and on until you reach the point when you can comfortably say "Okay, I've gotten this thing to the point where it's good enough. It's not done, it's not perfect, but it's good enough and I've already stayed up until 4am four nights in a row because of it." Of course, if you aren't a perfectionist, it doesn't really matter. But most CS folks are, it seems. Looking back on my courses, they were much like I had anticipated, although I did not foresee having a crappy group to work with for 310 and I certainly had not anticipated the good network of people I had to help me survive the term. After taking the year off to do co-op, I didn't think that any of my buddies would be left, but it turns out that they all did co-op too, so I had common courses with almost everyone I befriended within my faculty back in second year. I also reconnected with an old childhood friend and it's really just amazing how things worked out so that we're probably about as close now as we were way back when.

And of course I made a new friend. A new best friend, really. He is fantastic. I have no other all-encompassing word to describe him. No, he's not perfect, no one is. I realized somewhere along the way that it was not fair of me to project any weird ideas of perfection onto him. Reasonable expectations are fine, yes, but beyond that, it's just unfair to the person and I would never choose to be unfair to him. I'm thankful to have met him and I'm thankful that I took the chance. I remember being in a bad place mentally and emotionally less than a year ago, but I got through it and I think that all of the confidence and maturity that I gained from that year off doing co-op changed me. Maybe it didn't change the core of me, and to those who knew me so well likely saw little to no difference, but rather this change came out in my public self-presentation. I was able to crawl out of the hole that Accutane and mild depression opened up and accept myself and see value in me. That isn't to say that I don't ever tumble back down. There are still phases, but they pass and never seem to last more than a couple days now. But of course it never hurts to hear someone you love tell you that you're beautiful.

In short, I'm in a good place now and I hope that you all are too.