95A — Plymouth Rock would land on them...

This post is alternatively titled "Anxiety: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!." It is also surprisingly long, but I think that's because writing helps quell my emotions.

I hate this. Everything that happened today should have led to today being a good day. Nothing went wrong, it was a Friday, all the ingredients were there for it being an amazing day. Why then, do I still feel like I'm falling apart? I don't know, but it hurts like hell.

Today started off in the bitter cold of 6°F, because when South Dakota hears that winter is coming it goes hard up. The roads were not slippery though, thankfully, so the driving experience at least gave me some semblance of control over something in my life. I printed some Spanish stuff and worked on not very much while in the library before class this morning.

AP Psych was uneventful; we introduced our new unit which is social psych. One of the assignments is to "break a social norm", which personally I find mildly ridiculous because my entire existence feels like one big f-you to social norms in South Dakota, and actively defying them just seems extra. I conform not because I have to, but instead to keep it so not everything about me is different from the people around me.

Spanish 4 went slightly better. The two quizzes were relatively easy; I got a 20/20 on one, and the second one hasn't been graded but I think it'll be somewhere around a 100% as well. We're going over culture right now though, and honestly it's really interesting to learn about something different. Cultures are so focused on conformity and exclusion, especially (it feels like at least) American/South Dakotan and Chinese cultures that it's nice to see something different some times. Not all cultures are that stifling for sure though; RSI was a good example of this, because I was (almost) exactly who I wanted to be there: no more, no less.

Orchestra was pretty good, except for the pressure of leading a section combined with my inability to count complex rhythms and choose bowings which match the first violins so the seconds don't look stupid. I should talk to the concertmaster sometime. That'll fix it, despite the fact it'll take effort.

Lunch was spent deploying the new robotics website design, located here: rapidacceleration.org. I'm relatively proud of my work, although it truly was mostly just me adapting a very well-conceived, if poorly implemented, framework with a slightly better theme. Oh well. It looks good. I then went to get curry, which was potatoes and cauliflower today. Good stuff.

Cardio was an easy workout, followed (after a drive in slightly warmer conditions) by a relatively easy Calc test which took me twenty minutes. The problems were initially panic-inducing (some expression involving arcsin(cos(sin(x))) or something like that) but then I realized the terms dropped out because of the problem we were doing, and I was annoyed, but the test went well from there. I went back to the school briefly afterwards to set up some debate stuff, and then returned home.

At home, I took my now regular weekly nap, which lasted much longer than expected. I had dinner, and then proceeded to be high-energy for a brief while, starting my reading of The Importance of Being Earnest, which is absolutely hilarious, and a Spanish novel that I'm going to try to struggle through as practice. We'll see how it goes.

This energetic phase soon wore off though, which (finally) brings us to today's main(-ish) topic, which is I am anxious about how inadequate I am. A bunch of my friends are applying to Regeneron STS (because they're amazing and totally deserve it and this is nothing against them at all) and I just feel so dumb to have had social anxieties over contacting my mentor (who sent me the most supportive email at the end of RSI about how I'd done the most out of the RSI students they'd ever had) and the most miniscule of workloads relative to my peers stop me from applying. But, then again, I feel like I haven't done enough to compare to these people who have been doing research for years. I've barely touched a science subject apart from AP Bio (which is, at best, introductory) since getting home. Someone told me to try for ISEF today, and although I do want to see my friends again, I don't think my work is high-quality enough. I could probably sell it to judges, sure, and competition here isn't too fierce, but it'd be farcical to present that even if I made it into ISEF. It just doesn't feel like enough.

This thought train devolved (as most of them do for me) because I started thinking about my upcoming workload, which still feels like too much. I'm thinking about giving up trying on Google Code-in this year as well because I feel like I can't handle it even though I have so much free time  I can afford to take like a three hour nap. This just keeps feedback looping into my anxiety about not having the work ethic, the ability, to accomplish things. I sign up for too many things and get nothing real done. There's incomplete follow-through. It's a fatal flaw, and I hate it. And so the thought spiral linked into college applications—I felt like my applications were weak, but I think I realize now that they're weak not because I was bad at writing and found it hard to pick out the strong points to put into an application, but because any part I pick out is in and of itself inadequate. It's not that I'm this n-dimensional (as in, having multiple dimensions of identity) being that is hard to encompass into a written, limited form, but rather that each of my dimensions is near negligible. I try to accomplish too much, and end up accomplishing exactly nada, and everyone around either hates me or should hate me because I don't do what I tell them I'm going to do. It's too late to change now though—half my apps are submitted, and I'm not going to accomplish anything new by January. Bah.

I don't think anxiety is really the right title for this anymore, per se. Because I'm not really that anxious, I'm just disappointed now. I despise how little I've accomplished given the immense resources and opportunity I've been. Some kids would probably (and I would argue, have) sell their souls to get into RSI, and I've done nothing with the experience except enjoy it and reminisce over it. Things like that (my parents' education status, my access to educational materials, etc., etc.), over and over again characterize my existence. And I despise it. I don't feel as anxious over getting into a good school, even though wanting it to Just. Be. Over. is still a huge feeling I have, because I don't feel like I'd deserve it anyways, no matter how much I want it. What we get, what we want, and what we deserve are only tangentially related to each other though. We'll see how it goes. *sigh.*

Tomorrow: I'm getting up at 3:30 or so to go try and watch a de-orbiting satellite with some friends (if the clouds don't stop us) and then getting Perkins and probably going to volunteer for some robotics. Exciting, and probably enough to briefly distract me from my existential dread. (Operative word: briefly.)