R

Last time around I shut off contact with most people for a while, just to focus on work, and then came off feeling... underwhelmed, a bit upset, and irritable. Because I felt like I ought to have been able to finish, having sacrificed that time that I ordinarily would've spent seeing people. But we wound up not finishing anyway, and it pissed me off.

This time around I decided to trade work time for extracurricular time. The worry that we won't finish is still there, but I decided that I'd rather not regret missing out on these last few experiences, before college is over. And I'd rather not repeat last time.

I don't think I could fathom the prospect of working on a problem for three years and discovering it to be unsolvable all along, that most of your work was pretty much worthless. All those years of unfinished work. It would probably wreck me mentally and emotionally, considering how I've ended up in the past after a mere two weeks... two months of that. Last summer was a pretty low point for me in that respect.

A lot of my so-called schedule-planning in the past was really me trying to make a plan so that I wouldn't end up regretting my time here. It was so that I wouldn't feel like I'd wasted units and time on a class that I had no interest in, when I could be studying something else. As it turned out, that regret wound up being inevitable anyway... and now I leave here feeling acutely aware of how much more it could have been.

But at the same time, I realize that I'd have no way of knowing the "right" path before in the first place, without having had these "regret" inducing experiences. I realized that there were just some things I couldn't predict no matter how I tried, and that sometimes these experiences wound being pretty valuable later down the line for one reason or another that I couldn't see right away... like say a job interview. It's been a slow learning process for me right now, but looking back on things, I'm glad they happened the way they happened. Even though it could have been so much more. But such is life.

Less than a month left. Time to make it not suck.