Life Happened…

I wrote this in December of 2015, right after I finished my Associate of Arts degree, and never published it. I’m not sure why. I mean..life happens. I guess that’s why.

 

Life happened.

I have been told that it has a tendency to do that.

But, while I put most of my life on hold to work toward finishing my A.A. degree, life continued as if I didn’t matter.

Can you fathom? Seems a bit unfair, doesn’t it?

In the last 6 months, while I set aside my creative writing and some of the flash challenges I normally partook… partaked.. partooken? Ehh, whatever… I took part in (yeah, that works), pushed aside my gaming addiction for homework, and forsook (I got that one right… I think) my personal relationships to attend class, 6 months passed by. I know, I said 6 months at the beginning of the sentence and it seems redundant, but my point is that 6 months just zipped on by and I wasn’t a part of a lot of it.

Quite frankly, that kind of irritates me.

And now, at the end of those 6 months, I have my Associates of Arts degree (emphasis on English, of course) and I am on winter break before I dive back into school to start working on my Bachelor’s degree. But there is this void in my life. I got so use to the business of school, the constant deadlines, the homework and papers that needed to be done, the readings that need to be.. um, read, and the always present looming threat of failing a class, that now, in the calm and afterglow of it all, I can’t seem to relax.

The best way to describe it would be like running off a… you know what.. better yet, let me just show you what it feels like…

Yeah, that’s about right.

My life has been on hold while streaking forward at an incredibly increasing pace. Sounds a bit impossible, but because of my schooling schedule, I have placed a lot of what I would normally be doing on the side.

My Xbox cries to me some nights, begging me to play a game. My DVR is starting to threaten me with erasing some of the shows that I have let sit idle and unwatched for too long. Hulu is even chiming in with some of the shows that I loved to watch starting to disappear from the cue (because apparently, you have to keep up with the current episodes or miss out… ).

On top of that, anything even remotely writing oriented has been relegated to the simmer spot on the back burner.

And now that all my schooling is over (at least for this semester), the walls I have erected to keep all that stuff away have dropped, and everything is clamoring for my attention.

All at once.

A few days ago, while having a conversation with a blogging community friend, her comment to my dilemma made me put my situation into the following thoughts:

It is very akin to being in a bucket and the floodgates open up, you struggle to stop all the water coming in, frantic because the onslaught is overtaking you, putting your hands here and there to stem the flow, feeling the water rising, your heart rate quickening, just trying to find a foothold in order to at least stand a chance.

All the while, because of the panic and the self-inflicted need to accomplish stuff… let me say that again… stuff… you fail to recognize that if you just take a deep breath and go with the flow, most of that stuff will take care of itself.

Life is funny that way.

But the trick is, not to let the inflow of stuff kick off the anxiety of failure. That will just kill you. And I would love to tell you I have learned this trick, but truth be told, I am constantly having to go back and relearn it every few months. I think they call that… life.

 

P.S. (from today in 2018… ) I still have this issue. That’s a hard trick to learn.