do over

We've put another quarter in the slot – free play! Hit the reset button on a moment this year: what would you do over? Whether or not you analyze your actions – how would you act differently? Would the outcomes shift, or stay the same? From a single sentence to a whole day (and everything in-between), feel free to explain your choice, from how you felt immediately after the moment passed, to any thoughts that ran through your mind beforehand. Take a mulligan!

Graduate school has taught me so much about counseling, relationships, and myself. I would not trade the experiences that I have had over the past year, but something that I have shared with friends in other cohorts is that tending to your self-care and giving yourself permission to make mistakes is vital.

If I could do something over, it would be to learn that lesson faster and relax a bit more, especially during the spring semester. Burning myself out didn't help anyone (certainly not myself), and I hope other students realize this sooner rather than later. Society seems to expect us--or, perhaps more accurately: We seem to expect ourselves to keep full and active lives across a variety of areas, all while uploading filtered photos, tweets, and statuses that lead everyone else to think it's all effortless.

We take full course loads (and sometimes overloads), participate in our churches, volunteer in our communities, tell our supervisors that yes, we can take another client, make room for our families, keep up some semblance of having social lives, and feel our anxiety levels raising because there's another 14-page paper due and a presentation on theory on probably something else that we've forgotten. Not to mention the fact that we come last, because putting ourselves any higher on our list of priorities would seem selfish and wrong. (Or, maybe that was just me spring and part of summer semester. ...)

So, if I could do something over this year, it would be to take better care of myself from the beginning, instead of waiting for stress to build up to the point where I begrudgingly started putting myself first more often and realized that I wasn't going to be struck down by lightning for doing so.