It's the week before finals, and all through my life, the tension's so thick, you can cut it with a knife!
You guys didn't know I was smooth like that, huh? No, but seriously, I have like five different assignments due on Monday, followed by two finals on Wednesday, one the week after that, and then graduation(!) on the 17th. It goes without saying that the next two weeks are going to be wild. Today during my last class, I was making a to-do list of all of my assignments due soon. I finished the list and looked over it. I began to stress terribly; how on earth am I going to get all of this done? Then a thought occurred to me from the somewhere deep down. "It's still not as bad as court reporting school." And can I tell you, when this thought occurred to me, I laughed out loud, quite literally.
So, some of you may or may not know this, but I spent four years in court reporting school before I changed my major. It was a daily struggle. Don't take that last sentence lightly. The first year, I had so much motivation. I was only 19 and all anyone talked about was how much money I could make. I breezed through that first year with straight A's. I enjoyed it. I was able to keep my job and still got my homework finished in time. It was great. The second year is where the trouble began. Things became more challenging. To pass in court reporting you have to be able to write on a steno machine at 225 words per minute with a 96% accuracy. IT IS HARD. We built speed by 10 words per minute, and we had timed tests twice a week. I dreaded those because I couldn't pass them to save my life. I got so discouraged. So I practiced harder. I practiced more diligently. I prayed, and I cried, and I practiced, and I continued to fail. I quit my job to have more time for practice. I tried every possible thing my teachers recommended. All of my friends were passing every single test, and that just made it worse. I didn't understand why I was practicing so much harder and not seeing any results. I grew depressed. I developed anxiety. I gained weight. I was tired all the time because all I did was stress. After four years of the madness, I finally gave up. Once again, I was angry at God. God, how could you allow me to spend four years of my life in this program and see no benefits? Now what am I supposed to do with my life?
To this day, I still wonder why God allowed me to suffer through that. When I think about it, it still gets me down sometimes. But then that thought occurred to me today. And I got a small glimpse of what could be the reason for all the suffering. Since quitting court reporting school and starting this current degree, everything has felt easy. Not to discredit the paralegal program, because it does have it's own unique struggles. But they do not even come close to the court reporting program. Perhaps God allowed me to suffer through that hard and challenging time so that other things will seem easy for me. I'm going to make it my motto that whenever I'm presented with a challenge, I'm going to ask myself, "Is this harder than court reporting school?" And 99% of the time, the answer will be no. And when the answer is no, I'll know that I can handle it. God has been good to me. There's always a reason for the struggle. There's always a lesson to be learned. Thank you, God, for bringing me through that storm in my life. It makes me so grateful to be on the other side.
And to my friends who managed to make it through court reporting school and now are successful and thriving, hat's off to you. As far as I'm concerned, you're all superhuman. God bless.
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