Sisyphus and the Comforting Nature of Giving Up

In Greek mythology, a popular story is that of Sisyphus. He was condemned by the gods to spend eternity repeatedly rolling a boulder up a large hill, only to have it fall back to the bottom upon reaching the summit. It is from this story that the word Sisyphean, generally synonymous with futile, is derived. Performing a Sisyphean task is backbreaking, miserable, guarantees a plethora of self-worth issues, and flawlessly represents my high school experience. Each day for those four years I’d tell myself, “Today is the day I succeed. Today I’ll finish my work on time.” Each day I found myself falling short of what I know my capabilities are. After what felt like endless iterations of this cycle, I developed a comfortable relationship with my failure. There was and still is a very liberating feeling that comes from giving up on the responsibilities that fill my life with stress. I felt as if I was no longer lying to myself, pretending that rolling the boulder up the hill once more would somehow yield a different result. I spent most of high school eking out passing grades and generally keeping my head down. This worked well enough, until one day I looked up to find myself starting my freshman year of college.

I’d been presented with a chance to start fresh and to turn things around. This wasn’t the first opportunity I’d had to do this, but this time I possessed something almost entirely native to me: the smallest semblance of confidence in my academic ability. What I would like to say followed were three months of unprecedented achievement in my classes and a thriving social life. In reality, this was not the case. I came off the starting block strong, but started to fall behind with some of my assignments and struggled to maintain a routine. The study skills and productive lifestyle habits taught in my First Year Success seminar are incredibly useful tools, but I had already been exposed to them throughout my turbulent high school career. The challenge for me through high school was finding the motivation to utilize these strategies in my day to day life and this remains the case today. Despite all of this, I’m satisfied with this semester because it is an improvement over last year. Proving to myself that I am capable of gritting my teeth through the assignments that I would have given up on before and making progress, no matter how gradual, is a great asset to me. I view this semester not as a failure, but as the start of an upward trend that will result in the realization of the potential for success I know I possess.