The Drop

Suddenly the paper before me blurred. Words swam in the small puddle of tears that were accumulating on my project. My thoughts were like a mortar, bombarding me with words of failure, idiocy, and regret. This small New York State lab was the easiest, and first, of many. And I had mucked it up.

That day was not so long ago, and I remember it with spite. The project was in my least favorite class, Advanced Science. I didn’t like Science in seventh grade, but I was in ninth grade science in eighth. Why? Only God knows. Mrs. Maller (my teacher) demanded perfection from me, and I couldn’t give it to her. This project was simple: collect data, write report, hand in, and get a hundred. But while I did all those things some misunderstandings flipped my grades upside down. Mrs. Maller had finished the conversation about my apparent lack of brain cells like this: “And right there, you should have another graph with the data from your second trial.”

“I don’t have a second trial,” I whimpered like a dog being reprimanded for eating a shoe.

“Well, what are you going to do? You can’t hand this in.” Mrs. Maller gave me one choice. She had told me before that she thought I should drop, quit, I wasn’t good enough for her or her class. Now I knew it was my only choice.

“I’m gonna drop,” I resigned to my fate with a sigh.

And that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t want to; I was so proud of myself when I got into the advanced class. My parents had had such pride when I got into that class. I didn’t want to look like a loser, someone that was overestimated. But alas, there I was.

My feet dragged on; my head was filled with the sadness that was overflowing out of my eyes. I’m going to call Dad. I’m going to tell him I failed, that I didn’t have the intelligence for an advanced class. I hope he doesn’t possess the same love for my own achievement as I do. There it is, the phone. Pull yourself together! My eyes are still moist with the memory of my tears, but I am in control of it now.

518-xxx-xxx. My hand is shaking as I type in these numbers.

“Hello, Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. This is Jim Kelly.”

“Hi, Dad,” Who said that? It couldn’t have been me? It was too weak, sad, and helpless.

            “JD! Why do you sound so sad?”

“I’m gonna drop Science.” I was slurring my words like a buffon now. Pull yourself together!

“If that’s what you want to do.”

And that was pretty much how that conversation went. I told Dad the situation, how I would fail the project otherwise, how I was stressed to the point of breaking, and how I needed to quit. I cried, he consoled me, and that was that.

But now I’m happy I did it. Dropping Biology has positively affected my mental state as well as my grades. My grades are almost a perfect 100 now. While I do have regrets sometimes about the drop, I am almost totally better off. This has been an important lesson in stress. Being under unneeded stress is never a good thing. When you’re under too much stress it negatively impacts you, and you can tell. So think, what (if anything) is holding you down? And how can you get rid of it?

-James Kelly