Personal Narrative: The Plant Breeding Course

I was not ready for the Biology exam that week.

The course wasn’t about human anatomy like I suggested, but Plant-Breeding of all damn things. April mentioned that the quantitative genetics were easy, but that Sunday I spent hours pouring over the materials.

April met me in the Library to help me study, her explanations didn’t make the concepts any clearer. It was fine, I told her. I’ve been this stressed for tests in the past, and I had survived then. I’ll survive now. Denial.

I didn’t survive. The Plant-Breeding course was a rose’s thorn in my side: a thorn genetically bred to be a pain in my ass. I received a 2.4 mark for that course. It was a grade that tarnished the perfect GPA I once held.

I retook Plant-Fucking and marked high enough to move onto Bio-Physics. But after I received a 1.9, I used classical physics to calculate the velocity of my textbook’s trajectory into the ocean. Anger.

Maybe, I don’t have to be a researcher to feel success. I could become a lab technician. But even the lab technicians at my dad’s company still required a Bachelor’s in Biology. Bargaining.

It became difficult to sleep at night. My restless mind made nights long, and days empty. The itinerary of my daily routine consisted of “I don’t care”s and “ok, it’s fine”s. Less of my classes were about Biology; and more of my classes were chosen based on whatever wasn’t filled up. Depression.

And finally: Acceptance. It may be a purposeful inconstancy, but it stood out to me. On the other paragraphs Anger, Bargaining and Depression are at the end. Here it is at the beginning. It wasn’t until I reached Acceptance that I even realized that I was experiencing the stages of grief. I had thought the stages of grief only applied to the loss of loved ones, but I realized it applies to the loss of anything; even non-physical things like dreams.Also, I wonder if grief should be