IT Carlow: Short Notes, The First Two Days

I feel a bit like I've been blindfolded and I'm trying to make my way through the days, but every time I bump into someone I feel ashamed. And it seems as though others are calling back to me, irritably, to keep up, but I just keep bumping into people and it feels as though every day teaches me the same lesson that I'm bad at talking to people... or understanding what I am supposed to do.

- Thursday 13, September (first day of classes)

The first crowded class of our crowded day, I step into the crowded room and spot a scant few open seats. Only one near the front, and when I approached it, the student sitting beside slid her bag over and lifted the folding seat to block me. Incensed, I went elsewhere, and watched...
When another new arrival scanned the room and approached that place, she moved her bag aside.

-Friday 14, September

I have connected with counselling services on campus and may wind up regularly seeing one of the counsellors here on Thursday afternoons. I have also begun reading The Leadership Skills Handbook: 90 Essential Skills You Need to Be a Leader, by Jo Owen. It has made a truly excellent first impression, with wise reminders, some frank insights that I had not thought about before and a great deal of wit. It is broken into very short, succinct sections which makes it easy to cover a whole section even if I only have five or ten minutes, and makes it easy and inviting to keep reading one more bit. Reading the first handful of sections on Thursday really cheered me up by reminding me that the courage to try things even when I don't know how I'm supposed to go about them is a strength, and that I am not the only person for whom that takes courage.

It is too easy to be overwhelmed and caught up in the mistakes, and forget to value the process of learning and finding one's way that demands making some mistakes. Maybe I am not bad at talking to people; being a foreign student, even speaking the same language, is simply hard. That doesn't account for all of my recent mistakes, however, and it still shocks my system and my blood pressure to be intentionally kept at a distance by fellow students at school with gestures of disrespect... even, perhaps, repulsion. I had hoped I was done with that.