The plight of the bumblebee

The dilemma of taking four courses for an overachiever

Taking anything less than a full, five-class course load was an anathema to me until a few weeks ago. Whenever someone asked me whether I got rest over the holiday break, my answer was, “A little bit, but I mostly worked.” In this instance, “work” meant catching up on the dozens of readings I had neglected in first semester. A mix of high-stress commitments, work shifts, and mental health challenges caused a backup of theoretical texts on equity and diaspora—arguably the two topics I talk about the most—to gather in a shameful folder on my desktop. I’d taken five classes per term since I began university, and I briefly flirted with electing six courses last semester before realizing I was barely capable of making myself eat lunch every day, let alone committing to an intense academic workload.  

I don’t pretend to glamorize being overloaded, nor do I enjoy being stressed. It is a behaviour that has been engrained in me since grade school, when my mother enrolled me in swimming lessons, choir, Chinese tutoring lessons, and after-school math help, so I had somewhere to be after school every day of the week. I was taught that being busy was positive—there was always anticipation for more. My Flight of the Bumblebee (Rimsky-Korsakov)-esque routine followed me into high school, whose culture of club competition was intensified by our performing arts program. While singing in three mandatory choirs for my voice major, I was also applying to be a general member of any organization that piqued my interest with little regard for how much of myself I could afford to give up. I never considered the possibility of changing my overworked habits, because my family members encouraged me to devote myself to whatever I wished. The peak of my overzealous antics arrived when I applied to a total of 16 post-secondary institutions, with my central reasoning being simply that I wanted to see if I could do it.  

I needed to understand the distinction between challenge and stress. Thriving because I was being challenged to think in new ways is different from trying, and struggling, to keep my head above water the entirety of first year. I look back on poems I wrote in the deepest moments of my depression last year, and the lines of hopelessness are striking: the counsellor asks / “what’s stopping you from failing a class?” / i say / “because i cannot do that to myself.” / it wants to pacify me, contain me in a heatwave / until i suffocate from recluse / until i suffice with apathy / it is too hot to collapse on wrinkled sheets, so instead i fall inwards / fold my vessels into a bowline knot / until i can no longer taste sores / wrap self pity around my ankles / until i stay still. These lines were not written by a self I am proud of, and I measure everything I do against the lows of the self who could not think further than the confines of a dark, joyless room. Even in the moments that were manipulated by mental illness, I still forced myself to try to accomplish more.  

Currently, I am still enrolled in five classes. My mental health is on an uptick, but it continues to be a pendulum. I am involved in more activities and work than before, and my priorities are swirled in a perpetual jumble. But for the first time, I am weighing the benefits of taking it slightly easier and not forcing myself to give everything, because there are simply not enough pieces to go around. In my mind, taking four courses comes with many risks: financial loss for the full-time program fee, half a credit more to make up in order to graduate, the costs of summer school courses, seeing a blank spot on my timetable where my fifth class used to be, the disappointment in myself that I needed to let go of something in order to just barely manage relinquishing a valuable educational experience in a special topics class. When I hover over the “drop class” option on my ACORN account, my anxiety heightens, and I think about the criticism my mother would hurl at me for not being a consistent model student.  

Yet I cannot help but imagine that if I do press “drop,” there will be a palpable sense of relief knowing that I have saved myself from regressing into a self that does not know when to stop. I hope I’ll be steady enough in myself, knowing what I can achieve and have already achieved, to follow through on a long-overdue promise to take care of myself and to start eating lunch again.