Constant

I remember rushing into the girls' toilet after listening to a long paper review on how spiritual and psychological illness wasn't actually considered illness. The same thing happened after experiencing the finality of my prelims results slip. I always wanted to be strong - always unruffled - but then, looking down at my 5 for English, I just lost it and collapsed into a sobbing mess in the (thankfully lonely) toilet. The issue wasn't so much disappointment with myself as it was a sense of injustice, a desire to fight what was established as a "correct way". And I was so angry.

After about half an hour shutting myself in the cubicle and sitting on the closed toilet bowl with my head in my hands, I just began to pray. To ask God to give me the strength to deal with all of it. At first it was just silence and anger. But then I thought back of what Mr C told me, and messaged me, about how God has given me certain gifts, and then there was a switch that clicked into place in my head and I realized - one slip of paper does not take away from anything that God has given me. And my heart swelled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for those gifts, and my prayers turned away from anger into immense thankfulness. I don't even know what exactly I was thankful for - perhaps it was everything in my life, everything I already had. And then I thought back to the fact that God planned all this. He planned my choosing of the illness question, my initial joy at discovering a question I had answered in a practice essay, my double disappointment when I found out that question was not to be attempted. Similarly He planned for me to cry my heart out alone and He planned for me to realize I was far from alone. I think in that moment I began to try and shift away from my self-reliance, to just surrender the struggle and not think that I alone was in control of my life and the happenings in it. That was an amazingly liberating thought, and while the grade still stung for a while after that, I began to let go of some anger and eventually I really think I put it behind me as far as possible.

That incident comes back to me now, after the IB results, because I think back on that initial resentment of mine and how God motivated me to use the experience for good - after that incident I did essay after essay for practice and met up with my teachers and forced myself to think and write differently in some areas. Moving away from my established ways was frightening. But now I look back and I still can't quite believe I got a 7 for HL English and I do think that the drilling and practices helped. And I'm proud of myself for that. I'm proud that I swallowed my pride and anger and learnt to think differently and worked like crazy in the leadup to IB exams. I thank God for helping me to do all that... I thank God for my failures and successes both. Indeed -

"Those who sow with tears
will reap with songs of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with them."
- Psalm 126 NIV