Maybe I Exaggerate Sometimes...

First of all, I'm a dramatic person. I come from a family of dramatic people. My sister goes into seizures of terror whenever she sees a spider, my dad screams about third degree burns when you flush the toilet on him in the shower, and my mom thinks I'm lying dead in a ditch somewhere if I didn't tell her I was going to get ice cream with friends. So it's no surprise that, though I'm very serious and like to see things realistically, I can twist the truth and blow it way out of proportion.

This happened just the other day, with a Statistics midterm that I took. I was SO prepared. Sure, I hadn't gone to class, but the lectures were podcasted. I went through every lecture, read every chapter, did all the review questions- I was fairly sure I would make this test my bitch. So when I sauntered confidently into the lecture hall to find that reading and understanding the test questions was like trying to communicate in Swahili only using three-letter words that begin with "i," I was pretty flustered.

I walked out of the lecture hall like I was walking down Death Row. My fate was decided. I had bombed the test, and there went 10% of my grade. "Don't worry," the professor insisted, "it's curved. You probably all did a lot better than you think." I don't think that statement applies to someone who felt like projectile vomiting over the entire first row out of pure terror and anxiety.

So I called my dad, as I often do, to talk about what had happened. He was surprisingly calm about it (knowing that I'm an English major and math is FAR from my forte), telling me that if I get a bad grade in the class I can always just re-take it. "What's the worst that could happen?" WRONG QUESTION TO ASK. The wheels in my mind started turning, and the little voice in the back of my head that likes to over-think everything started yelling like a middle-aged drunk man at a football game.
So of course, when asked that question my first thoughts were:

Fail class --> Don't get into grad school --> Move back in with parents --> Stay unemployed  --> DIE ALONE

Of course, as everyone knows, that's not exactly a realistic way of thinking about things.  But at the time, it seemed reasonable. So my dad is telling me, "You know that's not going to happen." And I'm screaming, "SHH! LET ME HAVE MY MOMENT!!" 

Sometimes having an overactive imagination comes back to kick you in the face.