Cas Journal Prompts And Reflection

Welcome back everyone! Today is a truly monumental day, as it is the first time I actually follow the prompts Ms. Amy provides with minimal historical/pop culture references. Of course, with that being said, I will do my best to make my journal entries interesting and entertaining as always. The theme for today’s journal entry is “Showing Commitment to and Perseverance in CAS Experiences” (hint hint). The first prompt I’ve chosen is one that will allow me to reflect and simultaneously prepare for this new chapter in my CAS career. “When I choose to procrastinate, how did that make me feel?”
Quite honestly, the word to describe my feelings when I know that I’m procrastinating are not really appropriate for a CAS journal entry, so I’ll do my best to provide a PG description. Procrastination mainly makes me feel stressed and anxious – I feel that the more I procrastinate, the worse my project will be, yet I continue to procrastinate, leading to many stress and anxiety filled nights leading up to major events. This stress and anxiety are incredibly negative, and they often ruin my day as well as my family members days seeing as how I commonly take out my stress and anxiety on those closest to me. Ironically, these are the people I often ask for help with my projects, leading to some complicated social mechanics and me looking very, very immature. Procrastination also makes me feel worse about myself, and it greatly lessens my self confidence, especially when it comes to academics and tackling large tasks. This lack of self-confidence makes me feel far less productive, snowballing into more and more procrastination until it’s no longer an option.
The second prompt we will be tackling today is far less depressing than that first one, and once again brings us to a very reflective place. “Did you surprise yourself, inspire myself, or disappoint myself and how did that feel?” I would say that the only accurate way to describe how I feel after the completion of the first phase of my project is that I surprised myself. This moment where I surprised myself was very specific, and quite honestly while it was unexpected, it was very motivational, morale-boosting, and self confidence building. I was taking a moment to rest in the hallway after having put out multiple (metaphorical) fires, and it would be and understatement to say that at that point in time, only one hour after my event had officially started, I was feeling a tad bit overwhelmed. Anyways, as I stood slightly-shell shocked in the hallway, a few of my friends passed quickly, headed to their rooms to prepare for the first session. As they were passing, one of them put her hand on my shoulder and said “Well done Sam, no way I could run one of these on my own.” At that point, the others piped in, expressing their disbelief at how I could manage so many people and ensure that everything ran smoothly. It was at that moment in time that I sat back and said “wow, I guess not everyone could do something like this after all”. And while it may seem trivial, I surprised myself in the fact that I had indeed managed to pull off a successful trivia night and dual language MUN conference all by myself (with some help).