I overcame a big hurdle earlier this week when I finished up one of the three applications I’ll be sending out to grad schools for that MFA deal this month.  I had been beating myself up over it for about a month, for no good reason in particular, and as soon as I made a phone call to Rindo, I immediately felt a lot better.  I also had to put a lot of pressure on my friend and MA classmate from Oshkosh, Kevin, but hopefully he won’t hold that against me for too long.

Why do I put off doing things that are so easy, relatively speaking?  That’s one of the things I’ve always asked myself in this forum, as well on the couches of various mental health professionals over the years.  I still don’t have a good answer, but people are trying to help me with strategies for not hating myself as much for it.  Sometimes it works.  It’s consistently amazing to me that I keep sentencing myself to long stretches in that emotional purgatory when the relief I feel upon completing things is so immediate and satisfying.  It’s just as confusing (and light years more frustrating) to me, trust me.

I have to try to ride this wave of relief and positive emotion now, as best I can.  I’ve started working with some of my backpacking friends on plans for a 2014 trip, which is sure to involve higher elevations than last year.  With that in mind, I should get back to exercising with regularity.  I fell off the wagon last summer, and it’s been pretty poor going since then.  I made a bit of an effort in early fall–with Kevin’s help, actually–to start in on Insanity.  In my case, with the condition I was in, that’s exactly what it was.  I got about nine-and-a-half minutes into the first session, and felt like I was going to die.  It seriously took me another 35 minutes of laying down on the floor to catch my breath, lose the head rush, and regain the use of my legs.  That whole event has scared me away from intense physical activity ever since.

Finally, I spent about an hour today thinking about how none of the schools I’m applying to have guarantees of financial aid, which is something I’ve been saying I really need in order to go back again.  This is pretty typical behavior, too: getting wound up about things that aren’t even relevant, because I haven’t been accepted to any of them yet, anyway.  In relation to thinking about financial aid, I went through how I would pay for my car, my credit cards, an apartment, and health insurance.  It’s way too early to sweat any of that, but there it is.