Page 293: Catching Up

Two Wednesdays ago, I took my first midterm of the year. I also donated blood for the first time about ten to fifteen minutes beforehand. When I got home, I felt like I would die. I didn't, but I slept a lot until I felt fine again. It took about a week before I was completely fine again, but I am still really proud that I donated. Almost 20 years ago, I was hospitalized and given blood transfusions that surely saved my life, besides the birth control pills, so donating blood has always been important to me.

My midterms are officially done and I did well on my Global Studies 101 exam, which means that I actually got a C+. My teacher gave us a 6 point boost, so my official grade is a B. I don't know what the grade on my Peace Studies midterm is, but I feel a little iffy about it. The short answer questions really threw me off (and I didn't really review until right before the test). Now, I'm slowly guiding into that lull of class that most students are in as we enter the final weeks of class. I am still ridiculously glad that I decided to take classes this semester because I feel more and more at home as time passes. I don't know what I'm going to do once this semester is over.

Yesterday, I realized that I have shopping fatigue again. It has become too tedious and exhausting to shop for myself, but I do enjoy shopping for other people. I had shopping fatigue a little over two years ago and the only thing that fixed it was getting job so I was too tired to do anything else but appreciate shopping again. Coming off a year where I spent a lot of money to get past grieving, feeling this fatigue is nice for me and maybe my bank accounts. It's a sign of normalcy that has returned to my life since the insanity of what happened.

Normalcy hasn't been something that I've been consciously striving for. I don't know when I stopped working towards it, but I have and it's been nice. I like thinking about my future and wrapping it around school and my family. It's a bit refreshing to think about what I am going to minor in (which will be history and American Sign Language) and what I'm going to do for Thanksgiving. It's nice to even think about going on trips because one of my favorite vloggers has motivated me to travel. It's nice to be just a 30 year old woman and that's it. I miss Tym all the time, even more so yesterday during a difficult time getting to Target, but I also realized that he took care of me a lot.

While I am fairly independent, I am smart enough to know that I've been coddled and guarded the majority of my life. I enjoy it, but I think I enjoy my independence and diving into the unknown a little more. I've established a new kind of comfort zone and I know not to push myself beyond it too much.

I have a lot more that I want to talk about because the last couple of weeks have been pretty good, but I'll end this post here. I'm doing really well and feeling optimistic. That's the point.

Page 278: An Education

I have been so intellectually stimulated in the past month and a half. I've been to my fair share of colleges (four, I think), so there has been moments when I've been really into what I was studying at the time. However, I have never been this intellectually stimulated when it's come to my education and I am willing to invest everything I have (and will have) to continue getting this "education high."

I've never had a hard time believing that I was a smart person. I heard about my intelligence so much when I was a child, so I don't think I was ever insecure about it, but there has always been a question about whether I was being intellectually challenged and/or stimulated. When I dropped out of high school at 15, my grandmother inadvertently vouched for me when she told my mother that I wasn't being challenged and the boredom was the reason I didn't want to go to school. I don't know if that was ever fully the case, but I do remember not being as engaged as I should have been. I was pretty much waiting to get to college but even then, staying engaged posed a challenge for me because classes were either too easy or not easy enough.

Did I mention that I had really low expectations coming into this semester? I did. I wasn't even sure I was going to be taking classes this semester until the week before classes started, so I didn't have a lot of time to think about the classes I was going to take and how I would feel about them. I just knew that this was going to be the last year I would be able to go to school before my financial aid completely ran out and given that I was still unemployed, I decided to give this year a shot.

I was excited by all of the new student welcoming things and socializing, especially because I'd never been to a big university before and my first days of class at MATC were not as exciting, but I had no idea that I would end up learning so much and contributing to my education as well as the education of my classmates.

My teachers are highly intelligent women (My Global Studies 101 professor is a PhD in Nursing and does study abroad in Kenya, where she also helps people with HIV and AIDS while my Intro to Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies teacher is a Masters' in Sustainable Peacebuilding student who is only a year older than me and was an English and photography major). I get along with a few of my classmates. One of my classes has a huge number of students while the other has a smaller number students, so that balances out. I really can't find much wrong with my classes at all. Even the distance between my classes (one is literally a sky-walk away from the Union while the other one is about a five-minute walk away from the Union) is wonderful.

This week, a public defender came into my Intro to Conflict Resolution class to speak about incarceration rates and how the prison system has, in essence, become the "new Jim Crow" and I was amazed. Here was a lawyer who was my age and doing her best with her education. She was also super intelligent and I was a little in love with her. It was wonderful and may have reignited an interest for me to pursue law further down the line.

It's amazing to me that at the age of 30, fifteen years after I dropped out of high school, I finally know what it feels like to have this kind of mental stimulation in school. When writing became common and repetitive, after I lost my job and no longer had a daily challenge, and now that cooking is somewhat impossible in my kitchen; school came along and I am so ecstatic that it did.

Page 271: The Art of Reinvesting in Myself

Me, three years ago

 Three years ago, I took an interest in myself and decided to make improvements.

I went to the dentist and instead of him doing constant extractions, I asked him to repair my teeth. At the time, I thought that they were in such disrepair that they would all need to be removed. However, my dentist gave me fillings and allowed me to smile fully, as you can see in the picture above. I took some work but I paid my dental insurance premiums and did the work of getting to my appointments and letting Dr. Meinhardt work his magic.

After a huge fight with my mom that left us barely talking to one another and made me a wreck during the summer of 2012, I decided to start going to therapy. I did the work of going every week and being able to talk through all of my problems as well as allowing myself to take the proper medication to help my anxiety. I had thought that therapy was not for me after two horrible instances with doctors who either misdiagnosed me with every mental illness in the book or thought that I didn't take therapy seriously. I was able to express myself better without ranting on my blog or bottling it all up.

Despite all the things I still needed to work on like my marriage, money skills and the fact that I had no solid job, I was really proud that I had fixed my teeth and started to go to therapy and that made a huge difference.

A year later, I hit a major hurdle. I went into a self-imposed seclusion. I left school. I stopped going to the dentist. When my therapist from the year before had begun a new rotation and I had to see a new therapist, I started to lapse until I just wasn't going anymore. I barely went to the doctor and put off my hand surgery until September of that year. I got a new job in November, so I put my everything into that. Then, I didn't have time to go to therapy or to the dentist. My marriage had even gone from the sporadic visit from Tym to speaking solely on the telephone sporadically until he died last year.

For the most part, I spent the last months of 2014 working, grieving and spending money. I saw a therapist sporadically until he decided that he would not support my extended medical leave. I fired him promptly and didn't see anyone else until I saw a therapist once earlier this year. I never saw him again.

Despite the joy I feel that I'm in school and I'm studying something really important to me, I really feel...unhealthy (for lack of a better word).

My teeth have gone into disrepair again. I have more weight than my frame can handle and I now have to take blood pressure medication. I'm crying more than I did before Tym's death and probably during my grieving phase. When I'm at school; I suck back Wild Cherry Pepsi like it's water and my stomach has a hard time tolerating caffeine. My diet is nearly as healthy as I would like it to be and that's really disappointing because I really enjoy cooking and I am a great cook.

Mentally, I don't feel well at all. I'm not sleeping well. I've been having more panic attacks. I don't write nearly enough so I'm not really expressing myself that way. I hide away in my disheveled bedroom with the lights either dimmed or off, though my lights are so dimmed that I would be better off not having it on at all. I don't even listen to my music as much as I used to. I almost always feel trapped and powerless and incompetent. The dosages of my medication has increased instead of decreased.

It's really obvious that shit needs to change.

After getting myself this low, it feels pretty impossible to even think about where to begin but I guess that I'm acknowledging that there is a problem and I want to change it is a pretty big step. I know that there is a huge chance that Tym's death is part of why I've let myself deteriorate, but I don't want that to become an excuse that I'm using five or ten years down the line. It bugs the hell out of me that I am still grieving and it's only been a little over a year (and I know that it will take time, but I'm not a patient person).

I'm going to make some changes, though. If I could do it at 27, and that was a good year out of a shitty decade, I can do it at 30. My hope is that I won't have to do it again at 33 or 43 or ever because starting over all the time sucks. Now, though, I'm going to do it because I need to. I may not always want to, but I need to.

I'll start with therapy again, because I have a plan with that. I have an appointment in November and I'm going to go, whether I have a job or not, because I need my mental health to be in the best optimal condition. I'm going to make better choices with my diet, in hopes that I'll start cooking again soon. I have a slow cooker and I love that thing so much, so I definitely plan on using it again. I'm going to purchase dental insurance again because I really need to get my teeth worked on again and I like having wonderful front teeth or a nice set of teeth that I can flash when I smile.

I think if I can start with these things, everything else will fall into place. Great things are not easy things but they're necessary. I'm necessary.

Page 268: Figuring it Out as I Go

It wasn't my intention to be away as long as I have been. It's just that the longer I looked at my blog, I realized that I didn't have much to write about. To be honest, I still don't, but I think we'll be okay. We'll just have to take things slowly.

Last Thursday, I officially took the plunge and declared Global Security as my major. If I'm being technical, Global Studies is my major but Global Security is the track I'm in. I've decided to simplify things and say that I am a Global Security major. I feel accomplished now, especially because I'd come into school as Undeclared. I had set up an appointment and gone to that appointment to declare myself as an English major, but something went horribly wrong there. Now, I have an official major and I'm feeling good about it. I have about 55 credits to go, so that's about four more years or less if I decide to take 15 credits each semester. I'll figure it out, but it's not something I'm worried about.

As of today, I am sick. I have a cold, and I don't even think it's a bad one but it's definitely trying to take me down. I missed two days of classes, but I have an interview tomorrow so I have to go. Next week is also the midterms, so I want to be absolutely on top of my game for them. If that means I have to pump myself with so much cold medicine, I'm sweating DayQuil, so be it.

I feel hopeful. This is a statement I've used many times thus far, but I do feel hopeful. Last night, I was feeling pretty dark, so it's nice to wake up and feel like things will be okay. I feel like a lot is going on in my life, but I don't think there's ever been a time where a lot hasn't been going on in my adult life.  I tend to do well when overwhelmed, believe it or not. Methinks it's the anxiety that gets me going.

I'm super excited about going down this road to whatever the hell it is I'm supposed to do. Global Security and peace building is actually making me reassess who I am as a person and how I do things, because I don't want to be a hypocrite. It's hellish and wonderful trying to be a better woman. It's also hellish and wonderful assessing just how much power I have to make positive change. I'm not going to be able to make a difference overnight and I'm trying to reconcile with that, but I think it will be okay because the change I hope to make will be long-lasting and that's better than anything else.

Page 257: I Hope It's Not a Load-Bearing Wall

Yesterday, Meredith Grey bashed through her old life with a sledgehammer.

Okay, that is a bit of hyperbole, but I feel like Meredith was ready to start anew in last night's season 12 premiere of Grey's Anatomy. For a brief time during the end sequence of the show, I saw myself.

***

Welcome to your life. There's no turning back.

At around 3:30 am, I found myself crying and laughing at the same time.

I would be lying if I said that life since Tym's death has been easy. It's a constant cycle of change. Some days, I'm okay. Some days, I'm not. Whether I'm okay or not, I've pushed forward and continuing to live because there is so much that I want to do with my life.

I've been having bad dreams lately, dreams where I've been haunted by ghosts in almost a literal sense. I've dreamed about Tym. I've dreamed about my maternal grandmother. I've dreamed about my father. I wake up feeling panicked and sick and sad. It's likely that my stress has manifested in these dreams but I've never dreamed about my late relatives suffering like I've had this week. In an effort to fix this, I finally made a call to speak with a therapist again.

Going back to yesterday's episode of Grey's Anatomy, Meredith was pretty pissed with Amelia about putting a hole in the wall of the living room in their house. Of course, this caused conflict throughout the episode but there was a moment where Owen, dependable Owen, was almost caught in the middle of an argument between Mer and Amelia about the wall during a surgery. His response to diffuse the situation? He asked if the wall was load-bearing and then advised that the foundation of the house could collapse if it was. Again, the parallel between Meredith and myself and that damn wall was resonating.

In the past few months, I have really beaten myself up because I feel like I've made some really huge mistakes. I know that grief was motive, but that feeling of failure never goes away. When I'm not feeling like I'm a total fuck-up, I think about how far I've come in the past year. It probably wouldn't seem like I've made much progress but I think I have.

I've fully dedicated myself to school. I have struggles with wanting to go and having to sit through class and questioning if I'm even making the right decision. However, I am learning so much and my critical thinking abilities have improved and I've finally found a place where I feel like I can try to make a difference and satisfy myself at the same time. Yesterday, I had a wonderful lecture at school. Later that day, I had a conversation with my mother and told her that this is "my work." I discussed what the lecture was about and the new Global Goals initiative and said, "My work would include..." I felt really freaking successful in that moment.

In the meantime, I'm also looking for a job because I want to keep working on my studies and I'm going to have to start paying my tuition soon. I also have a lot of things I want to do with my life in general and while getting unemployment is great, I miss the astronomical amount of money I made biweekly when I was working (especially with the mandatory overtime).

I like that I'm moving forward and I want to keep moving forward, but I really do hope that I don't let my foundation collapse because I've destroyed a load-bearing wall. Since none of that is actually literal for me, it means that I hope that I can keep myself up without making myself sick or letting everything I am building right now fall apart. I like to think that I have a lot of time to do everything I want, but I'm still learning and maybe that's a good thing.

Page 253: The Art of Wanting to Give Up (and Not Doing So)

Last week was one of the hardest weeks I've had in months. I'm good under pressure and find that I work really well in those conditions, but it's only when necessary. Last week, up until yesterday, felt unnecessary and I became a hopeless wreck.

There are very few outside influences that sends my anxiety off the charts. Money is one of them. I loved my job and everything that came with it, so it broke my heart when I no longer felt comfortable there after Tym's death. I blame him and the circumstances, even though he couldn't control dying. Still, he was the only person who could throw me off my perch and he did. Not having a job and not making as much money as I used to has me in a spiral of anxiety and frustration.

I missed two classes last week and that made me feel even worse because I am so content with my school schedule, but I am literally being pulled in two different directions. I can do school and not make any money or I can work and not take classes. When I started this semester, I thought I was doing what God had wanted of me, but I'm not sure anymore.

I thought about giving up last week. I thought about dropping my classes and not looking for work and instead just laying in bed and crying until I ran out of tears. I felt like being in a maze I couldn't get out of, and then I went to class on Thursday and saw an alarming video on war in my Peace Studies class.

Talk about a mindfuck.

When I came out of class that day, I felt even more hopeless than before because that feeling of defeat was on a more global scale. I was sure that the only way that things would get better was if I became President or if God just ended the world. Until yesterday, I was all for God ending the world now. Do you know what happened next?

I remembered that it was my half-birthday.

My half-birthday is nothing special, if I'm being honest, but I think it's special because it's the birthday of an old friend of mine. Until last year, I wished her a happy birthday and she would wish me a happy half-birthday. On my birthday, I would wish her a happy half-birthday and she would wish me a happy birthday. Even though we weren't super close, it was our tradition and that tradition reminded me that there are bad things in the world but there are also good things in the world. I also felt like if I just gave up, I would be letting God and my family down, especially since I was as strong as I could be after Tym died.

I wish I knew what I'm supposed to be doing. I wish I knew that things would be okay. I don't know anyone who likes being scared and uncertainty is a scary thing for me. I'm trying to build myself back up from Hell Week, but I think I'll be different this time. I'll have to be more compromising and non-resistant because there are things that need to be done right now and it'll just keep getting worse if I'm not flexible to it. I've been through situations like this many times. I know how this works and I know that I'm going to have to start fighting again. So, let's do this.

Page 247: This Passion Thing

I'm a firm believer that when someone finds their passion, he or she will start seeing life differently. Suddenly, everything in their lives mean nothing until that moment when they find their passion and start following it. Their lives have indelibly changed.

Of course, that's how I thought it went for people who found their passion. I had yet to find mine.

I thought it was writing for a good long while. I really did. I felt like I could write my way through life and I would be complete. Then, I finished my book last year and there was a period in which I wondered what was next. That didn't last long, though, because my husband died and I was totally consumed with other things. Writing didn't feel like a passion anymore, though.

I thought that teaching was my passion as well. I'm not completely convinced that it's not, though. I still really enjoy the idea of teaching children and/or teenagers how to be productive members of society and possible scholars. I feel like I can do that and I would be fulfilled, but I don't know if I'm as passionate about it as I once was. I think part of it was simply projecting because I want to be a mom. Being a mom is always a passion for me, but not one that I will find any time soon.

For lack of a better sentiment, I was passionless. I didn't have a passion for anything.

Then, I started classes this semester.

I wasn't looking for anything that would make me all full of passion and want me to throw my ring in anything, but I did want this semester to mean something much different from the previous two semesters felt. I was looking to prove that I was happy to attend my dream school and that my dead person's money was being put to good use. So, I decided to take a Conflict Resolution class because I once said that I wanted to be good at that. I took a Global Studies class because I was interested in the major. I wanted to learn something before my financial aid ran out. Some. Thing.

Surprisingly, it was not my Global Studies class that made me feel passionate, although I'm learning a lot. I found my passion in my Conflict Resolution course. I felt like this was something I could talk about all day. When my teacher mentioned that she was getting her Master's in Sustainable Peace Building, my eyes glittered like I was looking at something sparkly. I found a part of a calling that I could get on board with, something I could do for the rest of my life.

On October 1st, I am going to officially change my major to Global Security.

I still write. It's not as much as it was when I was a teen or even when I was in my 20s, that shitty decade. I plan to keep working on my book and maybe age, and experience, will help me make it even better than it currently is. As for teaching, maybe I'll teach a new generation about Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies while I'm getting my Master's.

I hope to work for the Federal Government when I'm done with college. I think I would be a good asset to them. I would love to work at the United Nations or NATO, wherever I can make the biggest impact in helping the world become a little more peaceful. Who knows? I could end up becoming the first Black Female President. That would be cool.