Health Science Reviews

By Grace Van Heerden 

I have always been told “life is not just black and white”, but that there are shades of grey. Honours has taught me to have this outlook, especially in terms of my successes. I have often had the mindset that once you set a goal for yourself, you go out and try your hardest to achieve it; you either achieve it or you don’t, you win or fail. I’ve often found the same to be true for my enjoyment of things; I either like what I am doing, or I don’t. But this year has shown me the spaces of grey in between it all.

I have learnt leniency with myself. I have learnt to look at a situation, whether it be writing an exam or doing a presentation and trying to discern “what is it that I want to gain from this situation?”, rather than what mark I aim to achieve. I am focusing more on the skills I can learn from others or from a task, the tasks that I am able to do that I did not think possible or the enjoyment or knowledge I receive from the experience itself.

Finding the joy in the things that I do is something that has also become a priority to me. It feels like only yesterday I finished high school and got accepted into my undergraduate degree at UCT. Now I have blinked and I am almost at the end of my honours degree. And when I look back at all the things I learnt in my undergrad, I try and think about whether I truly enjoyed them; we often find ourselves with a list full of tasks to complete and assignments to submit, too busy to be present in the moment and truly take in the experience of where you are and how far you have come. I understand that this is not always possible, and that life does not always offer such luxuries because we are just so busy all the time, but I never want to feel like I am just doing something to get it done and feel like I have gained nothing from the experience. I want to love what I do and find the small joys, even in the most tedious of things, so that I can feel like I have a purpose and passion to what I do.

Bringing it back to “The Grey Spaces in Between”: this year has really taught me a lot, with the most obvious being the knowledge that I have gained from my degree and peers/academics, but also in terms of the things I am capable of doing and the person that I am, and especially the type of person I want to be, even though I do expect this to change a million times over. It is not just about “it is either this or it is that”, “I either like this or I don’t”, “I’ve won or I’ve failed”, “it is black or it is white”. There is lots of grey in between those extremes and its okay to exist in these spaces. I can’t wait to see what the short time we have left in this degree brings.