Ever have one of those days…

…when you go from 10 to nothing in a matter of minutes? I’m having one of those days today.

Last week, I started taking an online Math Course. It’s a high school course called Data Management (back when I was in high school, it was called Finite Math).

Now I’ll admit it. I’m a pretty good student for the most part, but math has never really been my forte. I cracked open my textbook and got through the first 3 exercises quite nicely. Then..in came something called Linear Regression.

What the heck is that? Then there was all this talk of coefficient off correlation, coefficient of determination, etc. Did I skip a chapter? I looked through all of the pages and couldn’t find anything pertaining to those things. The book also stated needing a TI-83 calculator. I eventually found out by looking at the course website that this was a graphing calculator. But…I just bought a calculator 2 weeks ago. It’s a casio fx-991ms. I can’t graph with this!

Oh ok. The course website shows a link to http://calculator.com where I should be able to find a graphing calculator, so I went there. I saw the calculator, but the book tells you all of these buttons that you have to press in order to get the answer…and none of these buttons are there! What the hell am I supposed to do?

Then, in came the tears.

It’s not like I can’t email my prof to get some help. It’s not like I can’t ask my sister for help. But with my disease, I almost feel like everyone has to do everything for me and I’m so not independant. I wanted to do it myself…I wanted to figure it out myself…like I used to be able to do.

“if I just took this stupid course when I was still in high school, without dialysis and with real teachers who were willing to help, I wouldn’t be in this mess” I thought to myself.

“Other people get this without other people’s help…why can’t I?” I thought to myself.

I know that sometimes I’m way too hard on myself. The thing is that I’ve always been used to be on top of things…top of the class, top of my game, etc. When one thing happens that I don’t seem to know or be able to control…It makes me so frustrated.

I decided to go downstairs and take a break. My mom said that she’d make me something for dinner, but when I got downstairs, she had dosed off on the couch and hadn’t made me anything.

Even more tears.

Really, it didn’t make sense to cry over that since I’m perfectly capable of making a meal for myself, especially since my Mom has been at work today for almost 10 hours.

I dried my tears and turned to my blog. I know that there are people out there like me who get frustrated. It’s normal to get frustrated…but it’s so not necessary to beat yourself up. If it were so easy to just learn everything on your own, there wouldn’t be teachers. If life didn’t have obstacles, what in this life could we experience to make us stronger? If things didn’t go wrong sometimes, we wouldn’t have character.

It’s ok to be wrong sometimes. It’s ok to be sad. It’s ok to be frustrated. It’s also important to get it out of your system and pick yourself up.

I feel a lot better after typing this