It was nice to finish and it felt like I’d won some sort of race when I walked out of the post office. On the other hand, I’m that much closer to losing something huge, and it breaks my heart that I can’t get it back no matter what I do. I really wanted to finish that packet so that I’d be under a little less pressure, but I also really did not want to finish this packet. I love this bubble I’ve been living in for the past two-ish years, and I don’t like tangible evidence that it’s ending. I know people come and go every semester, but I have this little circle of people in my semester and the semester below me, and I’ve really been enjoying the fluffy blanket feeling they give me (and the lady boner feeling they give me...sorry inappropriate tangent).
I wish that change didn’t make me feel insecure about everything, not just whatever it’s related to. Not small change, like school got let out early because it’s snowing so bad so now we have a long workday, but bigger change like this. It’s setting off all sorts of inferiority alarms because obviously if I could do anything, I’d be able to figure out how to make this last forever, and since I haven’t done that, well I’m just useless. I know how silly it sounds, but it’s still happening. I’ll be perfectly fine and going about my day, and then I’ll be completely crippled with anxiety about what I’m going to do with my life, how I’m going to find time to see the school people who live far away, why boys don’t like me (what? clearly they do, they’re just too chicken to say anything so instead they ask to read your workshop pieces early and want your advice on a title for one of theirs), why I don’t like anything enough to do it full time, why I can’t just “get over” my tendency toward migraines, silly things like this. This awful spiral of self-doubt, all because something that logically must end is ending.
But I gave it a good do. Maybe not my all, but I’m always very critical in retrospect. If I didn’t give it my all, I sure gave it my most. My thesis is solid, and my annotated bibliography was seventeen pages long. My class will be good, and my reading will be, too (I’m going to make the aforementioned boy power-read my entire 131 page thesis and pick out the material for my reading, since I don’t want to and if you’re not going to do both nice and naughty things to my, I will make you my bitch, and you will wish that nice and naughty things were all I wanted from you). But graduation will be sad. And the morning of the 23rd, when I put Amanda on the bus to the airport, will be really sad. I really want residency/Amanda to be here, but I also don’t, because then it will be that much closer to being over. I wish I could just be in a permanent state of limbo maybe the weekend before residency starts? That way I’d be at the peak of pre-res excitement, and it wouldn’t end. I want to be frozen in the Solstice version of Christmas Eve.
And yet, I can’t. Now that I have the biggest part done, I need to start looking for things I can stand to do full time, and start putting my resume out there. Hopefully I’ll find something I can start when Amanda leaves, but if it takes a little longer, that’s ok. If it does work out like that, though, I wouldn’t have to go to this stupid summer camp training in June that starts at 7:30 in the morning at a place an hour from my house, so the bus taking us will probably leave at 6:15, which means I’ll have to get up so early that I’ll probably communicate like a wolverine all day. And I’ve apparently been on West Coast time my whole life (ie not a morning person), so it’s going to feel three hours earlier to me than it does to everyone else.
In summation, I have very mixed feelings about sending off my final packet, but if nothing else, I am proud of all the work I’ve put in over the past two years.
