How’s that for a way to feel. It’s kind of like settling in on a drive and realizing half-way there that you have no idea where you are going, so how do you know if you’re half-way?
I mean, I could be just fine and over-reacting to every little thing in my life because stress sucks and, well, I have enough to share with a few friends (but I won’t share it, because it’s mine. Mine I tell ya!).
And another thing that’s fun… this feeling of anger sort of just hovers in the corner, like some sort of extra pissed off Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers, waiting for the moment when you think everything is going to finally smooth out and….
EEH EEH EEH… CHA CHA CHA… EEH EEH EEH…
It’s machete time and you’re just the idiot in the movie you would normally be yelling at to run or not go looking around in the dark corner. I mean, seriously, those people just sort of deserve to get hacked up.
And, like in the movies, that’s when I start to “Run, Forrest, Run!” And Anger is in hot pursuit, clawing at me, trying to drag me down, causing my blood pressure to rocket, my heart to race, and my mind to spin out of control… but never quite catching me because…
Apparently it’s wrong for me to be angry about things.
Seriously? Do you see the machete that I’m wearing like a Mohawk? I didn’t do this to myself? Don’t I have the right to be angry about it?
Hrm… angry about not being able to be angry… I, um…
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.
I would normally be ecstatic about this fact… ok, anyone who knows me knows I’m rarely ecstatic about the weekends (for multiple reasons). But this Friday has an especially demure aspect to it.
Week one of classes is coming to a close… and I can’t help but feel like I’ve missed something important.
I take all online classes and they all have a “check-in” kind of thing to make sure you are actually in the class. Most of the time it’s some sort of introduction where you write a brief bio about yourself (most of mine are so filled with snark (shocker, right?)) and anything else that the professor has asked.
I did all those. I think. I’ve double checked and even triple checked…
I’ve been absent. Probably not noticeably so. I’d like to think my voice has been missed by those who follow me, but I’m not so high on my own horse to believe that.
It’s been at least a month since I have posted anything, and quite a while since I have been doing any kind of regular… anything. Even over on my other site.
But, as a way of excuse, the summer semester just drained me. A literature class and a creative writing prereq class, crammed into 6-weeks each, are enough to cause any gray matter to liquefy fairly quickly. In that time frame, I read so many stories and different critique styles. I read Stephen King’s On Writing (a book I highly recommend if nothing more than for reading a memoir (of sorts)), and also was introduced to Joyce Carol Oates (of who’s book, Sourland, I read (or portions of it).
I also went away for vacation to Tennessee. A family vacation.
Oh, and I got A’s.
Which, come on, is really all that matters. Right?
I’m thinking I should probably write some of this stuff into its own posts. Maybe a book review or two, a vacation post with photos, and other stuff.
/shrug
Oh, and my brain finally started to solidify, finally.
Just in time to start Fall semester and the four classes I am currently taking.
Thoughts from the Front 