Retaining Sanity

I f*cked up today and all I could think of was the time I read the wrong chapter a decade ago. When I was 15, I took AP Psychology online, through the University of Missouri. Despite my love of psychology, it was a miserable class that I suffered through for a few months. That said, I learned an invaluable lesson that had plenty to do with psychology and nothing to do with what I learned in class. A few weeks into the class, I was averaging a 2.0 GPA (C), the lowest average grade of my entire academic career, before and after. I had done well on our weekly quizzes and my writing assignments averaged in the A to A+ realm, which was helping prop up my GPA after I earned a C- on our first exam. In my eyes --and, in many ways, the eyes of my parents-- this class was highlighting my greatest fear: that I was inept, a failure. The week after my ego-trashing exam, I read the wrong chapter. Every week, we read a chapter from our psychology textbook and then took a quiz online. We had ...