Taking a step back

Every once in a while I hit a point where I'm forced to reflect on where I am right in the moment. This point came to me recently, as I've been working through a head cold for the past couple of days. The other day I was feeling too tired to do anything, but then my thoughts went to the homework I could be doing and the time that I'd waste by not at least trying to do something. I'm one of those people who tries to do every assignment in every class as best as I possibly can. And that's where my point of reflection hit me: I realized how draining that is, and not just because I was sick. I want to do well in my classes, but does that mean I have to make an A in each of them? What if that's not possible? What if I feel like I need to put more time into one of my economics classes and less time into, say, my German class? I'm still dealing with this conviction that if I don't get A's in my classes it means I didn't work hard enough. I'm trying to change that, trying to change how I feel about grades and GPA's and things of that nature. Grades are just a number that is assigned to your work based on how well you did at one point in time. That time could have been confounded by any number of variables...but that's not taken into account. They don't consider whether you had a really tough semester and just couldn't put in as much study time into a certain final exam. They don't consider the fact that some people just aren't good test takers. You get a grade, and that's that. I'd like to change the way I look at my own grades and the the feelings of self worth that I tie into them. It's hard to, though, when so many things depend on how well you do in college. Scholarships, internships, jobs. I don't want to focus on school so much that I don't give enough time to my friends and other people I hold dear. Maybe I'm blowing this a little out of proportion, but it's still something that I'd like to change.
Yeah, so....that's all for now.