How I Survived September 15

So this week started on a hectic note that I feel surreal I’m ACTUALLY writing again after so many months. Here’s the thing: slump, getting into grad school, trying to get myself a job. You get the picture.

Fast forward, 2 weeks ago, I got assigned with my partner as first group facilitators in one of my classes. Not excited, but on a brighter note, our agony wasn’t prolonged. For weeks, my partner and I had to study and comfort each other when needed until September 15, our judgment day. I won’t get into details tho. 2nd week into getting things done before the dreaded day, something big came up: I was pulled out to teach Economics in a University.

Monday, I was given my teaching load and later on, been told to have my demo on Wednesday. WEDNESDAY, D-DAY. I thought, oh maybe having it in the morning meant my partner and I would still have time to prepare and finalize everything from our discussion to dry-run. But no, everything got so chaotic since I had to do my demo at 1 pm ‘til I dunno, and my partner also had to study for another discussion with one of her classes. So we had to keep our shit together, knowing our teacher is really meticulous and kinda perfectionist (trust me I would know I, experienced how he looked displeased with our mini experiment in my freshman year).

D-DAY, I woke up really early just to prepare for my demo and even practiced how to do it (I’ve been stagnant and isolated for 2 years so imagine the anxiety I had to deal with in a day, I even stopped drinking coffee within 2 weeks, well some days I had to drink except on and before Wednesday tho haha).

I finished my demo and interview with my fellow applicants at 4, and had to do last minute edits and dry-runs (we had a dry-run the night before but even forgot some of them during facilitation).

To make the long story short, each of our classmates including our teacher had to give us our strong and weak points. You know what was surprising? I was happy with all their feedbacks hahaha, especially with how meticulous our teacher is, the constructive criticism really helped me learn some points I missed: what I could do better in the future, and even appreciate my efforts more.

If this was my past self, I would probably beat myself up and tell myself how much of a failure I was, how I could’ve done better, or something like “this is a real slap you know, given you were trained to be a facilitator and this is all you’ve got?” and more negative things I could throw at myself. Instead of blaming myself to the core, I learned how to actually be kinder to myself at that moment. I was all “bitaw sa, pwede man unta tu nako buhatun, nakalimot sad ko (right, I could’ve done that but I just forgot). I changed the “I could’ve done better” to “I could do better.” That it was fine if it wasn’t perfect at all, since I did my best efforts despite the abrupt and hectic schedule, even when no one knew what I’ve been doing behind the scenes.

We had technical difficulties and a lot of weak points based on his standards, but I actually focused more on my strong points, the parts of myself I never knew I had. When I was training to be a facilitator in college, tho I knew I had my own strong points, there were moments where some of our mentors had really high expectations of us and needed everything to be perfect and when something did go wrong, we were given feedbacks that felt like we couldn’t commit another mistake the next time or we didn’t have any room for improvement. It was a hard-core training that felt like we were partly psychologically tortured haha. But don’t get me wrong that training did help me grow in some ways its just that we can’t expect everything to be perfect.

I’m not sure if its because of my age, or because I’ve been used to being beat up negatively in the past that I expected the worst feedback after our facilitation, but one thing’s for sure, I really learned something from my class. I learned not to beat myself up and I’m kinda proud of that. This may not mean anything to any one of you, but this means so much to me, knowing I’ve been beating myself up for so many years. And this is such a big step to healing and progress.

So just a little reminder, I do hope you get to be kinder to yourself. Its easily said than done, and I agree to that. It takes a lot of time, but it sure is worth it.

P.S To my partner who felt like it was the end of the world after the feedbacks, if and only if you get to read this, I do hope you don’t beat yourself up next time, you still did great 😊