I guess I really have matured a lot in the past 10 years, even though I didn't notice it.

I'm dealing with someone - several someones, actually - who are going through horrible ZOMG meltdowns over stuff. And I'm standing there, being calm, going "There's always a fix to problems like this. It's not the end of the world. There is some way of dealing with this."

I actually had someone in my office in tears this morning. And again this afternoon. And I'm telling them: if you don't finish, don't worry, I will grant an Incomplete. It is not a big deal. It is fixable.You can work on it later. It will be OK.

The truths are this:

1. Barring any kind of academic dishonesty, there are actually very few things in the academic world that are truly THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. I learned that after being asked to leave that first graduate program. It looked like the end of the world at the time but it turned out not to be. (What's the old saying? When a door closes, a window opens?)

2. Sometimes an "I tried my best" B is perfectly fine. Even an "I tried my best" C is sometimes perfectly fine. There's a big difference between trying your best and having things go against you (or just not having the skills or background for a class) and taking a lower grade because you're being lazy. I wound up earning a B in TEM (transmission electron microscopy) because even though I could ace the written exams (it was, after all, just optics, which I had already had in Physics II), I couldn't take a good micrograph to save my life. And I made my peace with that and accepted the B I earned. And was grateful that I would probably never have to do that kind of microscopy again, or, at the very least, could get someone with skills to help me.

(Though I wonder now, with having done so much more fine-gauge knitting and crochet and doing stuff like grabbing tiny soil invertebrates with tweezers, if maybe I've trained my fine motor skills better and I could actually do it now. Not that I'm going to try.)

And the funny thing is, 10 or 15 years ago, I would have been in the opposite place: the person believing it was well and truly the end of the world, that nothing could fix it, that I had F-A-I-L failed.

I guess all the stuff I've been through - even going back 20 years where I was asked to leave the first graduate program I entered, and living through a relative having a potentially life-threatening illness, and living through the congregational split, and applying for and getting tenure, and living through more journal article rejections than I like to count - it kind of raised the bar of what constitutes a "true emergency" to me.

That's not to say I don't still get overwhelmed some times, and want to sit down in private and cry a little. But I've gotten far better at picking myself up a few minutes later and going, "OK, what can I do now to fix this?"