Chapter 67

I mentioned previously that year 2 of the optometry program was the toughest. This is because of the content heavy courses and the general lack of breathing room. The good news was, usually if you survived it, you are generally considered to be in the clear for the rest of the program. With this in mind, I decided pretty early on in my second year of optometry to only do optometry this year. Because I was warned about the toughness of year 2, I decided to avoid all things unrelated to school. 

In my second year of optometry, I decided to cut all ties with the UW Orchestra and barely did any breakdancing. Even the only artistic event inside the optometry program, which was called skit night, was something I skipped out on this year (well…sort of, I’ll explain later). A bit of context towards this was that this was a school wide 1 hour program by all the classes where we’d go on stage and perform skits about jokes that happen in the school. It’s not so much cringey as it was boring but regardless, it was an outlet for some artistic expression in an otherwise very academic program. 

In year 1 of optometry, I had decided to do a classwide recording choir parody on the Beatles song “With a little help from my friends”. We made changes to the lyrics that changed the song to “With a little help from my lens” and honestly, it was kind of fun. Moreso, it took very little time and didn’t involve too much planning. Even then, I skipped out on it. 

So it came to be that in the fall term of year 2, all the extracurriculars I would do are acapella and work on campus part time. If you’re wondering why I did those two… Well… Before year 1 of Optometry, I was a music major. Outside of school, I was doing ICE, UW Orchestra, breakdancing, acapella and working on campus. In year 1, I stopped most of that. By this I mean I only kept breakdancing and working on campus at the retail store. The reason for this is that both of these things were very non-committal. My breakdancing was always in a drop in format now and as for working on campus, I reduced my shift to only a few hours a week. They were no longer large chunks of my time.

But here’s the thing, apart from doing skit night for year 1, I’ve not had any musical things to do since undergrad. I was missing it a lot. The other reason for keeping acapella? I knew the director of the group well and mentioned straight from the get go that I may need to miss a practice or two to study and they were okay with it. All in all, it was around 2 hours of my week and didn’t have too much of an impact on anything. 

Apart from that commitment, I had one shift at my part time work with UW Retail Services (the on-campus stationary store) which lasted around 3 hours a week only. This gave me a bit more spending money and thus, was kind of necessary. Once again, the more important thing was that this was basically nothing on my studying schedule. 

Essentially, what I’m conveying is that I had literally nothing else going on but studying for my courses. Even then, I had barely managed to survive the fall term. 

Then the winter term came, it got worse. I had barely recovered from the burn out of the fall term and now I was diving right back in. Unfortunately, this time I would run out of steam. How I got there would be relevant to how I came to finally realize what was going on. 

It was a simple fact and not much of a plot twist or a big reveal. All those countless times I felt stressed thinking it was definitely because of something to do with my hobbies, my relationship with the girlfriend or just the fact that I was incompetent was suddenly shaken. After going through countless sleepless nights of stress, eventually I came to understand that maybe there was something wrong with the curriculum of my courses and their questionable testing methods. 

Out of all the things I chose to blame when I was stressed, I had never really blamed the school. I mean, sure I heard my classmates complain but I only ever considered that to be jokes. Hell I even joined in a lot of the times in the rants. There was a level of denial here too. This program was supposed to be my life’s greatest achievement. It was supposed to lead me to a career and define me as an eye doctor for the rest of my life. Furthermore, I spent so much energy getting here. It can’t possibly be anything but the best…Right? 

Well… 

This realization came upon me in the winter term of my second year. My hobbies not being a part of my life did bother me but it wasn’t the main problem. The same thing can be said on the girlfriend front. That was because I came to understand that studying the materials taught was difficult and incomprehensible no matter what circumstance. I truly believed that it was the material that we were taught and the way that it was taught which was the problem. As midterms came and went presenting with a trail of questionable lecturing decisions, I felt a mentality forming in my mind. 

The spiraling thoughts started up from one key sentence.

Maybe all those complaints my classmates had were true. Maybe our school’s curriculum was as messy as everyone claims. Maybe. Just maybe. It’s not all just about me. 

I stepped outside of my selfish point of view after midterms and really examined everything. While it is unfair to blame the school in its entirety for the messiness that happened to occur, it wasn’t fair to say they were without blame. In hindsight, I’d say that the school was to be blamed at around 65%. That is to say, around 35% of the time, it was the students not learning or being lazy. However, around 65% of the time? It was the school’s fault. 

By this I mean a series of rightfully blamed instances where the school had made the student’s lives more difficult than it needed to be. The best examples of this were that our professors weren’t teaching the right things, the curriculum was simply confusingly inefficient and sometimes, it was just that our lecture slides were too bloated with irrelevant information. 

If you’re wondering if this was the rambling of a pissed off student hyperbolized to make it point, it really wasn’t. In fact, with the aid of hindsight I can tell you that a few years after my class made it through the ringer, the school’s curriculum got completely revamped. It changed. Though it is hard to say if it’s for better or for worse. The main point to consider is that at some point, there was so much negative feedback from the students that the school had to do a complete overhaul of the previous standards that were in place. Regardless of that fact, our class was still unable to benefit from this at all. 

Sometimes, it felt like our class, known lovingly as the class of 2020, had been cursed since our first year of school. In year 1, we had the most amount of substitute professors ever before in the history of our program. Following that, year 2 continued that trend. Some of the professors did an okay job but most of them seemed like they had no idea what the material was all about. They had inherited their slides from a previous colleague and the worst of them didn’t even bother to go through them before presenting the material to us. 

This was not a fun time for our class. In 2016 when we first started school, our class was full of optimistic people. But soon, I started to see a part of my cynicism in even the most bright-eyed colleagues. Worse still, some had become just simply angry at the world. And to be honest, who could blame them? If no matter how hard we study, the material will still be a messy clump of unusable information, why bother doing it at all? 

I think there was a moment when I realized that my classmates’ complaints about the school weren’t just jokes. I won’t get into specifics as to not single out a professor or a colleague. However, this is how it played out. 

One of the substitute professors had given a lecture where they had said the wrong information at every turn. This got so bad we started correcting them on the lectures they were teaching. Unfortunately, the professor was adamant on their mistaken information being taught. When the midterms commenced and we received a blatantly inherited test that was clearly not written by our substitute teacher, we were all unsure as to what to do. 

On one hand, some of the answers pointed to an answer that made logical sense, on the other hand, we knew how our professor taught the material. There was a disconnect between what the substitute professor knew to be true and what we knew as a class. From that point forward. It didn’t matter who was right. 

Half of our class ended up getting the answer wrong. It was visually obvious that we were unhappy with the outcome. We were allowed to review our answers for the midterm and when the session for reviewing happened, more than a few students from our class had heated arguments with the professor. This would eventually escalate into borderline yelling and honestly, it was just very uncomfortable for everyone involved. 

I recall that day because it’s the earliest memory I have of when I spiraled. 

After that review session, I got to my residence and sat down on my bed. I kept the lights turned off and looked outside. Something in me didn’t like my current life set up. 3 years prior to that night, I was in undergraduate studies in a condo on Lester street, sharing two washrooms with 5 friends of mine and occasionally, also housing my girlfriend. Now I was living in an ensuite room on Columbia with a room more than twice the size of any of my undergrad residences. I had all the space in the world and was in the program of my dreams but somehow, it felt more hopeless than ever. 

I should probably mention at this point that I was living with LP. That’s right. He’d gotten into the Optometry program one year after me and we’re now living together again. This time, we were in the program of our dreams. I can still recall how in high school we had made the decision to go into the Optometry program and then, almost a decade later, we were right there. On track to complete that journey. It felt like everything should be as good as it’s ever been, so why didn’t it?

Why was the program not all I imagined it to be? Why did we have so many substitute teachers? Is there a particular reason why all the usual course instructors decided to all go on sabbatical when our class came around? Why was our school’s curriculum all over the place and why am I having such a hard time connecting the dots on all the material we’ve been learning? I’m memorizing everything I can and still struggling. Why am I struggling not only to learn the material, but to care about it? If my professors don’t give a sh*t about learning the slides they inherit before teaching us, why should I? I felt my cynicism start to tear away at my motivation. No matter how hard I study, the material will still be a messy clump of unusable information. So why bother doing it at all? 

This was the spiral. A chaotic slew of negative thoughts about my program and my situation all leading to conclusions that get worse and worse. I thought about it more and realized that I was unhappy with my program but also just unhappy in general of what I was doing. In that instance, I became self-aware of the fact that I was sitting at home in the dark on a school night. There was nothing on the schedule but studying. That’s it. Why was that problematic? I used to do so much more. I did breakdancing, I did music, I did acapella and even last year, I did some skit night stuff at the very least. Now I was doing nothing to eliminate my stress and still, I’m struggling. A mix of thoughts about being incompetent and angry at my school filled my head. 

Unfortunately, this didn’t lack of motivation to try at school didn’t go away. Normally, I would spiral and recover but sometime during the winter term, it just stuck. The result from that? I just stopped trying as hard at school. I felt like the school didn’t care about my classes nor about me and if that’s the case, why should I care back? 

Towards the end of the winter term, I was running on fumes. I had very little motivation to study nor do pretty much anything. The only thing that kept me going was the clinical classes. During those clinical classes, we’d actually learn about things related to Optometry, things that can be applied to real life. They gave me a light at the end of the tunnel. But it still wasn’t enough to take me out of the slump I was in. I was depressed. 

Weird side effects started to pop up here and there. Food stopped tasting good. I felt like I was always in a brain fog of sorts. Colors felt less vibrant. The worst of it was that occasionally, I would accidentally overshare with my friends. I used to be able to deal with all of these internal anxieties alone, but now I’m finding that I have a desire to share things. It was not something I was used to nor liked doing. Psychologists and guidance counselors would tell me that it’s healthy to share but I didn’t think much about this. I liked seeing solutions and these mental health people seemed to me, at the time, as professionals whose jobs were dependent on keeping me in a state where I needed to vent. 

I suppose the only upside was that my relationship with the girlfriend started to get better. Now that I’ve finally diagnosed what was really stressing me out, things between us seemed like they fit more in place. Unfortunately, that wasn’t really enough to bring me out of the slumps either.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, finding out the real reason for distress would only make me more distraught. This is because even if I knew about the true nature of my stress, I was powerless to do anything about it. At the very least before this I could pretend that I just needed to try harder. Now I was just hopeless.

The insight I got from knowing the true nature of my studies only amplified all the negative emotions I was dealing with. Thinking back, I don’t think I ever got out of having those spirals after they began. They stuck around for pretty much the rest of my time in the optometry program. 

If you’re wondering how this will all play out in the next few years. Well…

To no one’s surprise.

It did not play out well.