It is an age-old problem: what to do when you have absolutely no idea what to do. Similarly: what to do when you have so, so incredibly much to do.
I experienced my first panic attack- and I am indeed choosing to use the word "panic" over the word "anxiety"- early in high school and it was very surreal and for several years I didn't understand what it had been or how it had happened. A traumatic experience at the start of college later became a trigger for more of these seemingly uncontrollable spells, but eventually they faded again, only be be reawakened by graduate school applications, and how! As I began receiving letters back from the schools, my life regained it's average state of calm... until now.
Something yesterday
hit pummeled a nerve and my day, despite being enormously busy, was overwhelmed with this increasingly heavy sense of dread. I woke up much too early this morning with my heart pounding and every fiber of every muscle stretched taught. I'm imagining piano wires, but maybe even better would be the cable suspending a piano from a 5th floor window. And maybe not a piano, but a cartoon anvil, and from a flying machine, not a window, and being dropped, not lowered...
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(me)
Eh, mixing metaphors again. The point is, I woke up this morning feeling right on the verge of losing it and so I climbed quietly out of bed and took a long hard look at a small stack on books on the kitchen table. Then I took a long shower and made a mental to-do list for the day. Then I started reading those books and finding many good things with which to (entirely) rewrite my lit review. Nothing is the same, and I've been dreading the process of redoing it, so awful was it last year around this time. But I can, and I must. So here is my list, and I'll be here on this computer until it's done:
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Make sure everything I need from my computer is backed up. I think it is.
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Upgrade my mac from the stone age of 10.4 (didn't realize I'd have to wait for the disks so I sprung for rush delivery. Doh!) so I can try and install Dragon Speaking Naturally. I need to find out if it can transcribe my interview videos for me. Transcripts would make my life SO. MUCH. EASIER. in the next few weeks, but if I can't get this program to do it for me, I'll probably try to do without entirely. Transcribing is for interns and people with time.
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Blog.
- Read some "story" and "discussion" sections and see if my blog might be able to serve at least some part of either or both of those sections. (Put off til I can get to the Flaxman on Monday)
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Deal with some consent form stuff
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Most importantly: Put together a first draft of the abstract that will be printed in the programs for our graduate symposium and which I must turn in on Monday.(the level of ease with which this was completed leads me to believe I have done it all wrong... YAY FOR FIRST DRAFTS!) I'll be honest and say I find this very annoying because we've been told so many times on paper and by advisers: YOUR ABSTRACT COMES LAST. Well, not this one! But I saw dear J again a couple of days ago and she had wise, relaxing words from her adviser to pass on regarding this particular requirement. If she (and Jim) are correct, maybe writing this version of my abstract will even help the actual meat of my thesis feel more... defined. Or contained. Or something.
So, it's a short list but full of big things. While I'm thinking of it, I need to blog more later about:
- Critical pedagogy and social justice education for rich kids
- Gender/race statistics of people
running NPOs
- How healthy crying can be
- Personal enlightenment
- What my thesis is now, and if it's okay to say not only, "It's not what I meant to do," but "It's not what I meant to do and it's so much bigger than what it even is."
My body hurts. My guts hurt. But "forward ever, backward never".
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