Before I start this I should add: I am immensely grateful to all the bean messages I got from everyone else journaling. It's so lovely to be a part of this community and even though I rarely contribute to other people's journals anymore, ghost reading them gives me a little bit of hope. Especially WingDings. Thanks for existing WingDings, who is Barracking, and also Obamaing for me. I president of the universe for you too.
Year 12, Episode 12: Should I even post this?
I have taken to doing anything but thinking about the exam at hand after I complete one. I made the dire mistake of watching the Worm’s academy solutions to the Methods Exam after I completed mine, somewhat confidently. Never again.
It’s been a strange time. Never in my whole VCE career, with all my complex number skills would I have imagined myself like this before the exam.
I’m not saying I don’t study. I put in a decent amount of work for each exam, and despite the dip in my brain function I do feel like the graph has a slightly positive gradient and I’m recovering the mental capacity to process a question, link it to pre existing knowledge and command my fingers to move in the writing motion. Which is significant progress from just three weeks ago, when my capacity was limited to containing the explosion of screeches inside my chest every time I sat at my desk.
I’m not too used to using watches or clocks, but there is one on my bedroom wall. Just a few days after the UCAT, it ran out of battery. For a while I would see it shake a little; sometimes if the wind pushed the battery a little the seconds arm would express a few quivers. Everyday was 10 am. I found it oddly poetic, to stare at how time had just stopped as the bane of my existence was dwelling on one moment. I never bothered changing it.
I replaced the battery last week. It was odd to see it moving. Time ticks by regardless of whether my clock holds it accountable. Now wouldn’t that have been an existential interpretation on the GAT’s writing tasks.
I’m not saying I don’t study. I do, but I’m just calm. Weirdly calm. I remember getting home from Biology last year, hayfever ridden, nose snorting tears and eyes puffy. I redid that entire exam and marked it with the solutions to multiple choice from some atarnotes post.
Forget Biology. That was last year. Even this year, I’d walk into a SAC, not breathing enough. Graphing for Methods SAC 1 was a task, my hands would shake so much my parabolas looked like furry necklaces. I would get up really early, sacrificing sleep for SACs. And it paid off, I’m not gonna lie. That first half of the year I was a good 90s student, minus a little less for spesh. I was down that route to a 99 ATAR, which was the ultimate validation of my self worth. Or perhaps my gateway into Medicine.
It’s weird to think about that now. It mesmerises me how obsessed humans are with numbers. The existential crisis of generally existing is so intense people like to have some way of quantifying things. The reward of a mark not being in understanding the question and even solving it successfully, but in answering it as a decimal rather than an exact value. Little details to trip you up. And I admire people that do well, that are excelling at VCE. It’s not easy, it takes a lot of work. I’m just reflecting on how much value we’ve put into numbers.
I completed English Language. It was a bit of a pain, I really enjoyed the subject. I’m gonna miss it a lot, and my teacher and I were good pals so it was sad to see it get done. Section A and C were okay, but I did have a bit of a confusion moment in the middle of Section B. I realised this as I was writing the last few sentences and had the biggest urge to cross everything out and restart. But I kept writing and allowed the words to flow out of my pen. When the exam was done, I did not think about it, and I did not care. I walked out, eliminating any bad memory I had of the exam, ready to go home and sleep. Despite the thunderstorms that night, I slept okay.
And same with Methods. All year I was obsessed with the marks and grading and how my SACs would scale. I walked out of both exams having left a few bits blank, and that’s okay. I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel ashamed of it either. When a fellow friend asked how much I was aiming for and I said “I just want to survive”, I meant it. She rolled her eyes and she didn’t believe me (which I’m not surprised given that I smell like ATARcalculator) but I meant it. I was glad I finished a subject.
The first Methods lesson I had was back in 2019, when I was in Year 10. Our teacher wanted us to understand why the subject was relevant, so he started with an application question. Draw a rectangle, then cut out 4 equally sized squares from each corner? What’s the volume? He said that was the first application maths question he’d done at high school and went down a tangent about Van Gogh, whom he was obsessed with.
Going through that first question on my exam, I could just hear his voice and the lecture on Van Gogh’s amazingness. It was soothing to solve for things, slightly worrying when my CAS gave a weird solution and I had to skip spots, but I wasn’t fussed. When the invigilator said pens down, I was calm. I felt okay. I gave it my best shot. I survived. And the same for Spesh. It’s okay not to get 40s for everything. ATAR is perhaps a shortcut into different uni pathways, but it’s also not worth more than my sanity.
I had a lengthy conversation with my parents about doing Medicine and doing well. Given my constant breakdowns they kept asking why I was pushing myself so much, so I kind of broke at one point and said “well you want me to do med and that costs a soul and a half”.
And turns out… they don’t care?
I’ll be honest, I love Medicine and the prospect of being a doctor, but as you’ve probably seen from the VTAC prefs, it’s not my only passion. I love helping people, that’s my thing, but Med isn’t the only place where that’s achievable. A big incentive in the Med pref was the fact that I thought it would please them. My parents are very lovely people and they don’t ever directly put pressure on me, but, growing up I did feel culturally and emotionally conditioned into thinking the only way to feel validated that I’ve pleased them was by doing Medicine.
They said my cultural conditioning was my own biased perception of what they wanted from me; they said they just want me to “be happy, but with pragmatic choices”. And I cannot express how badly I needed to hear that. I need to be putting in my best work, and then I can work with where that takes me ATAR wise. And sometimes, best work is not just waking up at 4am to do practice exams for Spesh. Sometimes it’s sleeping a full 9 hours and recovering my brain from all the churning I’ve put it through.
I’m just surviving these four more days, two more exams and then I can get on with my bucket list and finally start to live decently.
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Topic: penelope's (attempt at a) VCE journal (Read 32665 times)