Realisations realised a little too late

realisation
noun
1. coming to understand something clearly and distinctly
2. making real or giving the appearance of reality
3. something that is made real or concrete


* Thanks, dictionary.com


Sometimes realisation is a great thing. When something hits you, BAM, and suddenly the pieces come together; something makes sense to you. I swear there is even a facial expression that goes hand in hand, the “Ohhh” or a nod, or in my case normally a furrowed brow, followed by a laugh, because I normally miss the point on many occasions.

Then there is another type of realisation. This realisation dawns quickly, the same as above, but doesn’t have that same “oh, silly me” feeling accompanying it. “Oh silly me, they said this but meant that” sort of feeling.I remember in Year 12, in Extension English we had to do a 10 minute presentation on a text of our choosing. I did Othello. So I always tried to work really hard in that class. My teacher didn’t like me very much and never thought I could live up to my “potential”. So I slaved away at this presentation for weeks, and finally came to day to lay it all out. Unfortunetly for me, as I started reading, a horrible feeling dawned over me. The feeling of realisation. That I had completely missed the point of the question I was meant to be answering. Sure, I had a great speech, with some great points, good use of technical language, and a thorough knowlege of the text, but somehow I had missed the big picture, become too involved in what I was trying to do and failed to do what I was meant to. I remember pausing, and sighing, and thinking “It’s probably not worth going on”, about 3 minutes into the speech.

3 minutes isn’t a very long time, it’s not the quick and witty SNAP of realisation, when someone is watching you to ‘get’ something that may have been said, this one was a little more internal, felt in the pit of my stomach.Yesterday I had a similar realisation, that although I had felt it in my stomach for a while, it finally hit home today.It took me nearly 3 months for the realisation to hit that I have completely screwed my first semester of uni.

So I took a year off last year, after having completed the HSC, to work. That meant, for me, doing noththing more than bagging groceries for a year, and letting my mind wander around in the process. Lassoing it back in, and trying to train it back into study mode has been near impossible. I have a short attention span, I’m a procrastinator, I’m lazy, and I have a million reasons why something can’t work, instead of finding a way to make it work. I’d missed more than half my lectures and tutorials due to being sick, for the majority of my subjects, and was feeling apathetic to say the least towards my degree. I was so far behind, I was finding it impossible to catch up whilst simultaneously trying to keep up.

But today, while completing a media proposal that was actually due 10 days ago (and I found this out, 10 days ago) I had a really great realisation. I realised I actually liked what I was doing. I caught up on a few more lectures I needed for the proposal, and as I summarised my notes, I realised I knew what I was talking about. Suddenly, I felt a bit better. Suddenly, I realised that this is the way it could have been, from day one, point A.

Realisations realised, too little too late.