University Anxiety

I can’t pretend that I’m not very afraid. I’m returning to university in two weeks after a summer off, and all I can see in front of my eyes is me on the floor of my study, November last year, surrounded by unfinished work, completely numb and bawling my eyes out. Id smacked into a brick wall and yet again, failed to submit my final assessment. The clincher of such a repetitive activity, is that… I still pull a Distinction… even after flaking out on a submission worth 20% to 30% of my final mark. What does that tell me (aside from the fact that Im an idiot)? That I could do SO much better, but I cant.

I am afraid that school work will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I work fulltime, so I cant assume it would ever have been easy, Im not that naïve. But I was accepted into a double degree this year, so I am adding economics, management, accounting, law, and HR policy to my burgeoning workload. The double degree adds two years to my qualification, so for any sense of graduating before I’m due for retirement altogether, I need to increase my study load. To do this, I have dropped one day a week at work, which may sound helpful but in reality, it simply allows me to squeeze all my units into a day… that’s 9 hours of classes. And Im taking a 20% paycut in salary, a kind of stress I don’t need.

Jimmy is wonderful, suggesting that he take up the slack on rent, and he has picked up a second job. Im still modelling and that is still bringing in income, but I’m exceptionally strapped for time, so it’s a little hard to shoot. And you know, it sounds like I don’t want any of this – but I do want to go back to school and learn and graduate and apply my skills every day. I just keep seeing that girl on the floor, hanging onto the chair with white knuckles and wondering why she is there again. Here again.

2010 was supposed to be my year. Yet it just seems more like the year where I hang on for dear life, with my nails, on the bridge, over the river in the ravine.  God I hope I remember how to swim...