A lamp and a plan.

In an effort to keep myself busy over the past few days I’ve spent at my parents’ house, I’ve once again taken up my crafting habit.  I also had several in-the-works projects I needed to finish before they were ready to be packed away for the big move.  I finally finished up two of the four throw pillows I was making and also made a lamp just for fun. I’m quite impressed with the outcome of all three items and can’t wait to try my hand at a few more one-step-above-basic projects.

My dad also helped me plan out the arrangement of my new apartment.  I feel like I should explain that my father and I have been fascinated with architecture for years.  One of the best memories I have of growing up is drawing floor plans on graph paper with my dad.  I have a whole binder full of dream houses from different stages of my life.  Needless to say, we had both the materials and basic skills to make a rather detailed plan.

I’m pretty excited about the way it turned it out.  I was starting to become a little terrified of the move, but now that I can see something tangible and I can feel like I’ve worked out at least one tiny part of the puzzle, my excitement is beating out the terror.  Things will work out okay after all.  The other day I heard that Andy Grammer song “Keep Your Head Up” on the radio, and a few lyrics stuck out to me as I was driving home:

I’m buyin in the skeptics,
Skeptics mess with the confidence in my eyes.
I’m seeing all the angles start to get tangled
I start to compromise
My life and the purpose.
Is it all worth it?
Am I gonna turn out fine?

The other day these lyrics resonated with me, and I gave in once again to my fears.  I started to wonder if this crazy path I’ve chosen, pursuing an esoteric field and a position in academia that may be hitting its expiration point soon, is worth it.  Then tonight after dinner with some old family friends who asked me all about my new school and campus and my crazy, wacky love for what I study, I realized that I could talk to them about my passion all night.  They just answer with blank stares and nods most of the time as I go off on some tangent about an obscure poem I read or about an idea I had for my Master’s thesis.  Everyone tells me that they can see how happy I am and how much I love what I do all the time.  I guess I never realize because I never feel like I’m working when I’m doing what I love.  I feel like society has taught me that work is supposed to feel onerous and painful, but I’ve never felt like that while dissecting the use of medieval motifs in Harry Potter or while reading Shakespeare or while learning Middle English.  I’ve never felt like I’m working or killing myself to get a paycheck.  I find myself going back to it, reading articles, finding new books and authors to investigate, during my down time.  And that, right there, is when the rest of the song’s lyrics hit me:

This is just a journey
Drop your worries
You are gonna turn out fine.
Oh, you’ll turn out fine.
Fine, oh, you’ll turn out fine.

A little Vitamin C and a lot of change.

Remember that old song we all sang when we left the 8th grade?  It’s been kind of stuck in my head.  Now you can share in the experience.

As graduation approaches, I have been in a constant state of turbulent emotion.  I am excited to graduate, happy to be done with classes, to know that I accomplished something great here at UCF.  Yet, in the back of my mind, I feel like life is a ticking time bomb.  Here at UCF, at school, I have a great life.  It took me a while to build it, and now that I have it, I’m not sure I’m ready to give it up quite yet.

I can do well in classes.  I love campus, with its lawns and trees, the reflection pond, the library with its freezing basement and dusty literature shelves on the 4th floor.  I love the Teaching Academy with its giant, spinning statue of a hand, Colbourn Hall, the crumbling home of the humble English Department, site of my thesis defense.  I even love the crazy construction and the tiny trailer of a UWC I spent 30 hours a week in for so many months.

I will miss all of this, but mostly, I will miss the people.  I will miss the people who have somehow become my family away from family, the people who make me laugh and smile, the people I can call at any hour, the people I share tea and tears with on a regular basis, the people who understand the crazy path I have chosen, the people who have made this city my home for the last four years.

I am afraid to leave them.  I am afraid I will never find something so great again.  I know that the relationships I value most will not end with graduation, that no distance can break them.  Yet still, I am afraid.  I don’t want to give up my ability to visit my best friend at any time, to walk across campus to share bagels and tea (or coffee) at Einstein’s, to drive to Starbucks and know that friends will be waiting there for me.  I am afraid to leave everything I have grown attached to over the last four years.  I have built a life here, a life that I love, and in a few short days, it will all be over.  It will all change.

It’s taken me a while to come to terms with this fact, and I’m not entirely sure that I have 100%.  I know that I am ready to move on, to start something new.  I need a new challenge, a new setting, a new perspective.  It will be healthy for me right now to get away from here, to start again.  I’ve slowly come to understand that, as much as I am afraid, I am ready for this change.  I am ready to embrace a new life, to create something fabulous again.

I will not lose what I have here.  The things that matter most will follow me wherever I go.  The people I love will always be with me.  I may not be able to stargaze with my boyfriend at the reflection pond and I may not be able to share some Joffrey’s tea with my best friend, but I will still have what these people (and so many others) have given me.  I will still be the person I am finally happy to be.  My life will change, but I do not have to.  I have changed so much since my first year here that I might not even recognize myself back then.  I have become the person I’ve wanted to be for a while.  I have grown, and just because I’m moving does not mean I have to lose that.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?  Well, I am ready for a change.  I am ready to embrace the unknown and to attempt the impossible.  Who’s with me?

Maybe not so terrible after all.

Life has been pretty great lately.  Despite my many doubts, I successfully defended my thesis on Thursday.  Hooray.  It’s over.  I’m done.  Publication here I come.  Things seem to be falling into place a little bit more lately (and I mean, extremely lately – Did I forget to mention that I got denied from my dream school at 1:00am the morning of my defense?  Awesome, right).  Well, that was a blow, but at least after that, I’ve returned to my normal, generally successful self.  I found out that my thesis chair was genuinely disappointed about my slew of rejections which quelled my fears that he had written me a horrible recommendation.  I passed my thesis defense with only minor revisions to be made before final publication.  I made about 50 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to help feed the homeless in Orlando, and I spent a wonderful day at the park with a pretty great guy.  Then, to top off all of my happiness, my best friend and boyfriend organized a great little surprise dinner to celebrate my successful thesis defense.  All in all, things are looking up.  The sun is shining, and despite the terrible Florida heat that has already set in for the summer, I am happy.  I feel like I have grown and changed a lot in a short amount of time.  I think I can attack another round of grad school applications with a new perspective.  I think I can be happy about it and know that I am on my way, on my way to where I need to be.

I think I’ve found my faith again.

Terrible twos and threes.

I’ve always heard that bad things happen in threes.  I hope this is right because I’ve had a pretty terrible week full of news topped off by terrible event #3, a car accident.  Car accidents have always frightened me, even the little ones.  Today’s was only my second bad one as a driver, and considering I walked away with nothing more than a slightly swollen and pretty painful knee, I hesitate to call it bad.  Anyway, they kind of terrify me.  The idea that we rocket around in these contraptions that can destroy us in an instant just chills me.  It makes me realize that life certainly likes to throw us around and see what we can handle.  Hopefully I’ve had my share of bad news for a while.  I’m honestly not sure I can take much more.  Talk about a sign…. Just when I thought life was going well, that I had finally figured out what I want, WHAM!  Maybe that’s taking things one step too far; I don’t know.  What I do know is that I feel like my whole life is going up in flames, like I can’t do anything right, like everything I touch ends up worse off.  This is not a great way to be feeling a day and half before my thesis defense.  This is, in fact, probably the worst way to be feeling.

I’m not sure that I’m processing things correctly right now.  I’m not sure that I’m processing things at all, to be honest.  I kind of feel like I’m just floating by, going through the terrible motions, counting the days before D-Day.

I know that I’ll make it through this somehow.  It’s what I do.   I will pull through and be okay in the long run.  It’s dealing with the short term that’s killing me right now.  It’s the right here, today, deal with this now kind of things that are taking a huge toll on my psyche.  My dad wisely told me today to lean on the people who care about me, to let them hold me up while I feel like falling down.  He’s right, and I plan to.  I am lucky.  I know that.

Orange.

Today was an orange day.  I’m not sure why, but it was.  When I got to school today, the color orange seemed to follow me everywhere.  My students were evaluating their essays, making them stronger with specific supports, elaborated details, and sensory images.  For some reason, almost every kid that asked me for help ended up describing some kind of orange object.  Then, at lunch I noticed that every single thing in my lunch box (yes, I bring a lunch box) was a shade of orange.  Not to mention, every other teacher in my same lunch block had some sort of orange-colored food.  I have no idea where all this orange came from, but it certainly took me by surprise today.

Maybe it has something to with the fact that several people have told me to be more outgoing lately.  The True Colors Personality Profile assigns orange to those people with no inhibitions, those people who will do anything, try anything once.  The people who are never afraid.  My little brother is like this, and I have always envied his fearlessness.  I am not fearless by any means.  I am always afraid, afraid of failure, afraid of rejection, afraid of heights, lightning, wasps… Everything.  I can’t even imagine what it would feel like to be fearless.  Perhaps these people are right.  Maybe I should take a more active role in my life and stop being so afraid of everything.  I can’t change the world, but I can make my way through it.  Fear is inevitable.  We all have weaknesses, things that cause us stress and worry, but only some of us let those fears run the show.  I need to take control.  I need to stop being so afraid of failure that I don’t even bother trying.  I need to believe in myself and to believe that I am a capable human being.

My life and my world are up in the air right now.  I’ve jumped off the cliff, and I could land anywhere.  The hardest thing for me to accept right now is that I will land.  I will land somewhere.  The decision of where might not lie in my hands.  In fact, it lies in the hands of 6 adcoms who have yet to inform of their decisions about my future, who have yet to crush or bolster my dreams.  They may hold the steering wheel, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t get in the car.  As Sam Witwicky said, “when looking back at your life, don’t you want to be able to say you had the courage to get in the car?”  Well, yes, yes I do.

I want to get in the car that is my life.  I want to stop letting other people tell me what to believe about myself.  I want to be me, to pursue my dreams, however lofty or ridiculous others say they are.  I can’t control everything, but I can make the best of what I have.  This whole applying to gaduate school business has stopped me in my tracks somewhat and made me re-evaluate a lot of things I once believed.  Giving up control is a difficult thing to do, but that’s what applying to graduate school requires.  I have done everything in my power to make myself the best candidate I can be.  All that’s left is to wait and see what happens, to let others show me the next ways forward.  The even scarier fact is that I will spend the rest of my life in the same boat, waiting for others to approve or diprove of me.  Masters Thesis Defense.  Comp Exams.  Dissertation Defense.  Peer Reviewed Journal Panels.  I have chosen a path that requires external approval.  Now I just have to learn how to know that I am not defined by these external opinions.  I am not simply a “check yes or no.”  I am exactly the person I want to be, and that has to be enough in the face of everything, in the face of failure, of rejection.  That has to be enough.

As a friend reminded me the other day, “You’re in the best position.  You haven’t been rejected by your dream school yet.”  On that note, I am moving forward with hope.

Revision season?

It’s no longer rejection season.  It is now revision season.  I have spent the last 48 hours in serious revision mode, red pen and all.  In fact my last red pen is about to die on me.  Unacceptable.  How will I work without my favorite Bic crystal pen?  Hmm… why am I hung on up on silly things like that.  I guess it just goes to show where my head is right now.  After an eventful and incident-full evening last night that did not resolve itself until 3:30am, I was up again at 7:30.  One visit to my friendly neighborhood Starbucks and some moral support from two friends later, I was on my way to seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

As I look over the revisions I have made to my thesis in the past day and a half, I am astonished.  These are the most extensive revisions I have ever made to a piece of my own writing.  On some pages, the original text is barely distinguishable beneath my advisor’s blue markings and my own red ones.  It’s bizarre and invigorating all at once.  What kind of English major would I be without having done this kind of intensive revision at least once?  A pretty terrible one, I’ll tell you.  I mean, I’ve worked at the University Writing Center for the last 2 years and have told more students than I can remember to revise, revise, revise.  I always felt a little bit like a hypocrite.  There I was lauding the value of extensive and intensive revision without once participating in the process myself.  Sure I’ve cleaned up a paper or a draft, but I’ve never gone in with the intention of making serious, main-idea-altering changes.  Now I have, and I am happy for more than one reason.

As much as I may hate it, I know that this process is making my writing and my argument stronger.  I know that I, in turn, am growing as a writer.  Most of all, this process seems to have ushered in a revision of my mental state.  Just last night, my mom told me that I sounded sad on the phone, that she could hear in my voice that I was stressed, upset, anxious, unhappy…. You name it, my voice revealed it.  Today, I woke up in a similar state, but one grande iced coffee and several red pen revisions later, I was feeling confident, confident in my ability to overcome the seemingly insurmountable task in front of me.  As I accepted the fact that maybe, just maybe, my mom and my friends were right, that I can do this, I began to feel confident in other ways.  I felt happy.  I wanted to smile.  I laughed and joked and ate food and drank coffee and, miraculously, enjoyed myself.  Despite the odds stacked against me, I felt confident in my ability to succeed and to pull through it all, in my ability to prove to my advisor that I deserve this honor, that I am capable of finishing this project, that I will be ready to defend by March 25th.

A friend recently told me that this time in our lives is more often than not a test in ignoring the people who tell you no and never admitting that you’ve reached your limit.  Today I learned the truth in this statement for myself.  I have chosen a passion that requires me to face the impossible every day, to stare it in the face, and to say “bring it.”  I am here to do the impossible and to allow my passion for it to fill me up and see me through the trenches.  Nothing about this situation is going to change.  Ever.  I have chosen this path and must accept the consequences of such a decision.  The funny thing is, for once, today, in the midst of all this pressure and uncertainty, I am more excited by the impossible than I am afraid.