When I started at my new school in grade 5, the principal spoke at our first assembly and told us to “always see the glass half full.” While I’m sure she meant well, it actually did the complete opposite for me. From then on, I tried to see the bright side in absolutely everything that I did, and while sometimes it was easy to see the good, sometimes it was really, really hard. This meant that when I didn’t see the good in any situation, I felt like I’d failed.  

I carried this mentality with me all the way until grade 11 when my math teacher turned to me one day and said “Alix, sometimes hard things are just hard.” This completely changed my life. See, I’d been living with the mindset that things weren’t allowed to be hard, and that if something was hard or not enjoyable, I wasn’t doing it right. In reality, I was just trying to find positives (which isn’t a bad thing, don’t get me wrong), but in doing so I was pushing and pulling myself so much that I just ended up being even more exhausted or upset than I would have been had I just accepted that sometimes… things kinda suck.  

Coming to MtA I was fresh out of a tiny school I’d been at for 8 years; I’d lived in the same town for basically my whole life, and I’d had the same friends. Life had become this well-oiled machine, and I knew exactly what to do and when to do it to make things go my way. Then, reality hit. I started first year at MtA, got my first marked assignment back and bam the 67% hit me right in the face. I was DEVASTATED. It took a few more bad grades to get into the mindset I currently have, so don’t expect this overnight, but I realized that I had to change the way I was thinking about my grade. Yeah, it wasn’t a great grade. I couldn’t sugar-coat that. Hard things are hard. But then I thought back to the ‘always see the glass half full’ and realized maybe I’d been looking at it wrong.  

I’d been trying so hard to avoid all negative emotion and feeling, when in reality I should have accepted how I was feeling, sit with it for a bit, maybe even feel a bit sorry for myself, but then see how I could learn and grow and move on. I tried applying this to my bad grade and ended up doing better on the next assignment. And better on the one after that. It all came down to my mindset, and how I delt with my perceived failure. The same goes for rejection. I’ve always been weary of people who get rejected from something and immediately are focused on the next goal, because I’m sure that when they process what happened later on, they have an even worse low trying to deal with it. When I get an answer or a result I don’t want, I allow myself to feel the sadness or disappointment! There’s absolutely NOTHING wrong with feeling all the feels. I let myself get upset and let myself process it… BUT!! Then, I get back up, look to see what I could do differently, and move on from there.  

There’s a lesson to be learned from everything you do, it’s just a question of trying to find it. So, I definitely believe my old principal now and do really think we should always see the glass half full side of things. But I also believe my math teacher and thing that hard things are hard, and we should let ourselves feel not ok sometimes! To throw one more way overused saying in here, everything in moderation. Sadness, happiness, anger, excitement… feel all the feels, and then move on! At the end of the day, everything is going to be ok.