Author: k.villegas

With an essay deadline approaching, my friend and I decided to go to the writing center to have the final drafts of our essays reviewed in the hopes of a potentially higher grade. I was definitely skeptical at first because I’ve always been someone who’s had a love for writing, making me self-conscious and defensive when it comes to any of my written work. I’ve always been picky with the help I’ve received, and tend to disregard most of the constructive criticism I get because I convince myself that I’ve put together some impeccable masterpiece that shouldn’t be deconstructed. Walking in I realized it was a very quiet and still environment, but there were plenty of friendly faces. Most of the time that I was sitting there and getting feedback I just kept thinking to myself how valuable this guys’ criticisms could be and if he even understood the approach I was taking in this essay about gender. He could tell off the  bat that I was a bit anxious and impatient, so he just looked through my paper first with minimal commentary and corrections. He then looked over it a second time and told me that while my writing was strong and relevant that my organization needed adjustment and that I would get ahead of myself within certain subtopics. While I wasn’t happy to hear any sort of critiques in the first place, I knew that I had to listen, because this was a service that was provided to me for my benefit, not to set me up for failure. While I do tend to be closed off to criticism, this is something I may consider doing in the future, because it can only improve my writing, and later, boost my ego! 

Everyone tends to overthink.

But a select few tend to overthink their overthinking.

Like spending 3 hours overthinking what they should present for a class assignment, thinking that every idea they’ve come up with is uninteresting or irrelevant or too impersonal to convince anyone that this is what they actually think about life.

On a typical day, these over-thinkers will spend their time constantly scanning every environment they awkwardly walk into, nervous that someone else is scanning just as thoroughly-critiquing, or more specifically, critiquing them.

But all of this critiquing is not coming from some stranger, all the critiquing is happening in the overthinker’s head, they’ve experienced the 7 stages of grief before they’ve even had the opportunity to form any sort of concise, verbal response to the over-thought question they were presented with just 5 seconds prior.

I know what you must be thinking, “I relate to this, we all overthink.”

I’m not discrediting any sort of anxious experience that anyone in here has faced on a typical day, because lets face it, this is college and we walk out of here just needing a nap and an entire box of frosted flakes.

This is to the over thinkers on steroids, who within as little as ten seconds convince themselves that the anxious tapping of their foot on the floor is enough to distract an entire class, or enough to piss off the person sitting next to them, or maybe even that all of this leg shaking will eventually wear out their leg muscles and that they’ll end up in a wheelchair, unable to walk, considered a handicap, thinking they’ll never receive any sort of attention, meaning they never get married and die alone in a studio with 7 cats all while thinking that nobody is going to remember to give Clawdia her dietary cat kibble.

But hey, maybe everybody does this.

Or maybe I’m overthinking this….

This past Friday, I was able to convince some friends to go back into the city with me and entertain me while i filled the requirement for my FRO class, but the museum ended up being far more entertaining than expected. Everything there, whether it was a part of an exhibit or not, was eye catching. One of the areas, that was probably my favorite, was the room with the dinosaur fossils, which i ended up buying a souvenir from! Dinosaurs are something that we usually just hear about in movies, television, or through random conversation, but actually being face-to-face with something so inexplicably big makes you think. Talking about big animals, the famous blue whale model hanging in the ocean hall of the museum was so huge that it dragged any attention of the room towards itself. My friends and i split up in this room, quietly taking pictures and admiring certain parts of the exhibit on our own. We also paid for the mummy exhibit, which my friends made me rush through so the most i got out of my money for the special mummy exhibit was a few captions and sight of some clay pots. Towards the end of our touristy antics, we were in in the exhibit with North American animals. This part of the museum was breathtaking. It was while the museum was about to close, since they close so early, so we we were basically in the exhibit by ourselves with the exception of a couple photographers. It was super quiet, and we enjoyed every minute of it up until the automated message on the museum loud speaker told us it was time to leave. All in all i hope to go back, because spending under three hours in such a large museum is wasteful.

On thursday, I mustered up enough courage to join a club, which is something that’s typically out of my comfort zone. I was nervous because I figured most of these people were already familiar with each other and had a set foundation for how everything was run, but I knew that if i wanted to get to know people in a new school I’d have to reach out. I chose G.L.A.S.S, the gender love and sexuality spectrum club, because I knew going into it that it meant a lot to me and would give me a safe space to not feel out of place and to feel comfortable and embraced. This would be  a club that would allow me to represent myself and certain people in my life, and not only would I be educated on the struggles of the LGBTQ community, but I could share all of that knowledge with others, and help them to understand what our community stands for. When I was heading over, I was so anxious that I contemplated not going at all, but I knew that if I avoided that opportunity then and there, that I’d probably just avoid it completely. I missed my train so I was 25 minutes late to the first meeting, but even though i walked in late and was super clumsy and awkward – later becoming the center of attention, I was greeted with smiles, and I knew that this was an understanding group of people. The people who helped run the club all introduced themselves and we played a series of icebreakers to get to know each other, and my nerves had gone down because I was genuinely enjoying myself. Within that hour and a half, I knew I had made a choice that was going to going to make my time in college more exciting and comfortable than I had expected.