I know I haven’t written seriously in forever - and that I do so now only to prevent myself from finishing the final page of this not-even-long, but certainly intimidating, paper. It’s like I’m afraid of my own success, or something.
This semester has been terrible, overall. Anxiety and depression issues, coupled with the scenario with Mom1, have had me out of my head. Missing the week of classes to be down with her was a good call, and one I don’t regret - and I’m grateful that my stepmother pushed me to do it. She’s incredibly supportive and sympathetic, which I appreciate, and is certainly better than the opposite. But it gets grating sometimes; she can be too supportive, too emotional, and I sometimes find myself biting back the urge to remind her not to project her emotions - that I am not her; my mother not hers; this battle with cancer not the same. And thankfully, not as severe.
Mother is well. Her recovery from the surgery was nothing short of miraculous, seven nights in the hospital spent talking and eating and walking laps around the sixth floor of surgery patients, chest tube and vial of bodily fluids still attached to her but stubbornly in tow. I’m told the first two to three days after her surgery, when she still had more than just the one serious tube in her, that things were different. The picture was a little greyer, maybe, and she was nowhere near as spritely in looks or behavior. But by the time I’d arrived to Ocala, she was sitting up in bed wide-eyed and soulful and itchy and impatient to get the damn tubes out and the damn hospital gown off. It was encouraging - surreal. Like nothing had changed except the wardrobe and the scenery.
The results, the biopsies of marginal tissue, as well as all three of the lymphnodes they removed to analyze - have come back clear. Super clear. Not a trace of tumor in sight, and although they will proceed both with a second opinion and with chemotherapy in a month or two, the doctors are hopeful (and surprised) at results that suggest they may, in fact, have gotten it all in one fell swoop.
Returning to school, both after this entire ordeal, as well as the ordeal of New Orleans - reinvigorating, inspiring, upsetting, soul-wrenching, life-changing, I can list a thousand phrases or adjectives or denonyms that come to mind - getting back into the grind was impossible, to say the least. The work I’d missed crashed down on me, my professors (all of whom had pledged understanding and deadline extensions in e-mails) seemed to forget their words the moment I set foot back on Pennsylvania soil, and my anxiety and paralyzation in the fear of catching up left me paralyzed, frantic, depressed, unproductive, and having two different breakdowns in two different professors’ offices in order to get my point across.
So. I’ve had the last few days, our official Easter vacation, to work on the things I’ve missed, put off, or otherwise need to tackle. Break officially ends tomorrow morning, but I don’t have class until Wednesday, so. Twenty-four more hours to stick my nose to the grind.
My boss, A, generously had me over her house yesterday for an Easter lunch. A is a young - very young - woman who I hadn’t exactly taken a liking to upon her first being hired, and whose intelligence I questioned fiercely and frequently, and yet she’s impressed me often in the last few months. My respect for her rose exponentially with the tact with which she approached me, knowing I’d be one of few remaining on campus for the holiday, acknowledging that I don’t celebrate but was welcome to her home, asking all the right questions about dietary restrictions - I was flattered and deeply impressed. Let it never be said that I don’t reserve room for challenging my own judgments of people. My student-boss, Ben, was also invited. And so the three of us, along with my boss’s (also young, and sinfully hot) husband, and his (also sinfully hot) twin brother celebrated Easter in a low-key way, eating British food, watching college basketball, debating the merits of National Puppy Day on ESPN - and, per A’s crafts - munching out of homegrown Easter baskets she’d thrown together for Ben and myself. And entertaining her five cats.
It was strange, and strangely comforting.
The entire semester, barring those these last few weeks I’ve discussed, have felt grating. Grey. Anxious. Flooded, monotonous but overwhelming, academically stimulating but personally unfulfilling. In less than four months I will be on a plane to India (something that’s looking more official every day), and I’m not at all sorry. I’m ready to go. I need to shake my life up in monumental, indescribable ways. I’m restless. It feels like I have cabin fever from being trapped too long in my own head.
This upcoming weekend is overwhelming, in terms of events I’m chairing, attending, fundraising for, participating in, and so on and so forth. A very cool prospective student that I hosted last week will be returning to campus for a state-wide debate forum that we sponsor. In thirty-four days, I will turn 21. In three and a half months, I’ll be in Delhi. In just over a year, I’ll be graduating. All my friends who face graduation now are terrified, nostalgic, reluctant. They want to cling on, hold back, to look at the future and say no, not yet when all I can do is sit here impatiently and will it to come my way.
Although I have, admittedly, gotten to the point of anxiety where I worry that I will be unemployable, and no one will love me or hire me and as such, I’ve begun abstractly contemplating grad school. (Those who know me well will understand the sheer desperation I must be experiencing to consider extending my stay in academia - a land I despise.) And yet, my inner insecure conscience whispers to me, you don’t want to be a professor, you don’t want to be poor, what’s the point in grad school?
You’re right, I tell myself. Law school it is.
The grass really is always greener, I suppose.
1 In early February, my mother was diagnosed with Stage 2 lung cancer, a fact whose implications, and repercussions are a large part of what has kept me away from this journal for so long.
