It Varies from Season to Season
I’m sitting here, listening to the ‘Cab, wearing my Sonic Boom shirt, and thinking about a place far away. This has been a hell of a week… I’m really sort of starting to lose my “everything is going fine” shine and feel like worry is setting in thick and strong. I sort of finished grading my essays today. Finished in that I have the initial grades done, but they need to be looked over again and compared against the other TAs grades to make sure we’re on the same scale. I also maybe got the microphones for Sunday secured… lets hope so. I’m going to sign up for classes next week. Next quarter is sounding really great to me these days. Three classes… no TAing. Phew.
There’s a part of my soul that feels cowed. Like I threw my hat in the ring, and now that I’m in the ring, I’m not sure what I’m doing here. I feel like I’ve spent the last 6 years working for this moment. And I’m not feeling very exuberant. I’m feeling scared, and stressed, and cowed. I hate to think I’d give something up solely because it seems to hard, but I’ve been called a quitter before. And it would be disingenuous to suggest I never quit things for being hard. I’ve done it pleanty. But I don’t think this is one of those times. I worked too hard to be here, and I really don’t have anything without this. This time, there is no “normal” to go back to. Trying harder is really all there is, because my whole life looks like chaos without grad school. I don’t think I could ever stomach failure on that grand of a scale.
But god I’m tired. And I feel so inadequate. And nights like this, part of me sees going home to Seattle as an easy escape. A place where people don’t have expectations of me, and everything is familiar and calm. How ridiculous that I feel like I fled Seattle because people had expectations of me I didn’t want to deal with. Life isn’t always very straightforward.