Do or Die

My brain and my back are having an argument about which can give out on me first and after almost a two-week battle, there's still no clear winner.

After three months of study, I'm nearing crunch time on my first CTR course and I suspect the stress has simply gotten to me. Oddly enough, I sailed through school in my younger days effortlessly--rarely cracked a book, rarely bothered with homework (I was usually done before class was even over), and still managed to ace my exams and come out at the end with almost a perfect GPA. Same was true of my MT course--finished ridiculously fast and with few mistakes, though I have to admit at that point I was desperate enough to study like my life depended on it. (Actually, it did--the resulting job enabled me to toss a long, lousy marriage on the funeral pyre.) I recall feeling determined, but not particularly anxious. It didn't hurt that I had the luxury of spending 12 hours a day with my nose in my textbooks.

So what happened? I started this A&P course very excited to be back in school, but quickly took a bad turn. First chapters were great, but then I came up to that first exam. Didn't help that my sister-in-law had a heart attack and various other little family crises piled up at the same time to provide distraction.The material was killer--chemistry and all that good stuff I'd managed to avoid in high school and college--and I was suddenly freaking about a little test. How many questions would it be? How much of this incredibly detailed material would I really have to know? What happened if I really screwed up on it? The more I balked, the worse it felt. Test anxiety was a fairly strange thing to me. Even worse, the clock was ticking--only 15 weeks to complete the course, and if every chapter was this bad, how the heck was I going to hack it?

In the end, of course, I sucked it up, took the test, found it to be almost disappointingly short and easy, and rediscovered my old self and plowed headlong into the rest of the course like a fiend, desperate to make up the lost time. Of course, I also encountered logistical things I'd never had to deal with before because I am now working full time and still have a household to run (I'm sure I could run off on a heckuva tangent about the fallacies fed to us women about how we can "have it all," but I'll spare you all that particular rant for now). Yes, I can throw a case of ramen and institutional-sized bag of frozen vegetables at my teenage daughter and she's set for a week, but I've still got animals to depend on me, crud to vacuum, dishes and laundry to deal with, groceries to restock, and the occasional room to gut and totally redo (still not sure how last bit happened, but it ended up monopolizing my entire two-week vacation I'd so carefully saved up to devote to my studies). I found that I've been useless during the work week and my usual weekend catch-up activities in general still leave precious little time to focus. In the end, I've had to get ridiculous and devote entire weekends to devouring my course, lest I get tripped up at the finish line by running out of time.

So yeah, I'm finally at the point where all I have to do is study the crap out of this thing and pass the final--and yes, I'm finding that anxiety rearing its ugly head again. I have a suspicion that the deadline is going to save me from dwelling too long on the matter because it's bootstrap time. I just need to grit my teeth and "Just do it!" as those folks at Nike keep telling me--hoping that the shoes aren't a necessary ingredient because I prefer to go without. Unfortunately, I think the stress has found a way to assert itself anyway as my sciatica and deadhead vie for attention. I'm currently telling myself that once I pass this final (like that power of positive thinking?), my stress will disappear, my brain will start firing on all cylinders, my back will unclench, and I will have the luxury of a week or two before I head into the next module and start all over again. In the meantime, I think it's time to resurrect my motto and remind myself that failure is not an option.

Here's hoping I survive not only the final, but the next few months without a chiropractor or a wife, though I'm beginning to think the latter might bear some serious consideration.