The Moment

The all telling moment. The moment of no turning back. You check and double check and triple check to make sure every single requirement is stapled in there. You reread the paper for the 60th time and suddenly you see the grammatical error that must've slipped from your keen editor eye the first 59 times. Panic. Your heart starts to beat out of your chest and your hands start shaking and you frantically search for White Out in every single crevice of your back pack. Then you grab a black pen and try your best to replicate the font that you typed in. And finally the come and swipe up your paper, the thing that you sacrificed 5 precious hours of sleep for, and you know that it's all over. You can't go back and fix anything or add a better picture on the inside or make the title look prettier. Now it's all in their hands and all you can do is hope and hope and hope for a great grade- or at least a tolerable one.

Every single student who has ever put together a huge project or assignment knows that moment. And I felt that moment big time on Friday as I pushed down on the stapler and took one last look at my creative nonfiction project as I handed it over and had to just trust that I did a decent job. It feels wonderful now- having that project out of my hair- but there's still that little voice nagging me at the back of my head, telling me all of the things that I could've done better in my project. But sometimes, you just have to let whatever's bothering you go (not to sound like Elsa or anything), in order to keep sanity in your life. What I've figured out is that when you stress on and on about something that you can't do anything about, you can't really focus on the most important things at hand. If you can't do anything about it why worry about it? But anyways, you're probably asking yourself how this connects to my beginning story and here's how it does- all those moments you have when you can do something to help that stressful thing, do do things that will help because after it's all over, you'll only be stressed about it. Just use every moment you have to make things as perfect as possible and you'll be much more satisfied during that moment before you cannot do anything else.