I stand by what I say
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“I meant to…” So many things.
I planned to get things done this weekend, especially today, with the extra day off. Nothing…not one thing…accomplished…except that I messed up my sleep schedule, so no doubt I’ll have insomnia tonight.
Every day feels the same any more–whether it’s a weekday or a weekend, I wake up, maybe go through some motions, something in the back of my mind tries to get the rest to actually do stuff when I get downtime but the rest of me just won’t. Every night I hate going to bed because that means the day is over and I really didn’t get anything done. Even things that I know I know how to do because I did them as a volunteer before student teaching, I find that I can’t. I can’t think.
It seems like nothing goes right. I know that sometimes little things do, but even then I don’t know why so I can’t do it again. And on a very important level, though on the good days I can fake it, I don’t know what I’m doing. So far I’ve managed to unlearn a significant portion of what I “learned” in grad school but I don’t have anything to put in its place.
Thing that drives me up a wall is I know this isn’t the way I really am. I can get stuff done. I can think. I’ve done it. I’m the one who shoves my way through to a solution to the problem. But it seems like that part of me is worn out, or broken–just when I really needed it.
I can’t stand being compared to people. I already know I don’t measure up; don’t tell me the laundry list of ways that Mrs. Lorenz does or Mr. Tanner did. I know I’m not what I was supposed to be. I know that I went from fast track, early in undergrad, to barely scraping through licensure and still not having stuff done for parts of it or for grad school. I know that it took an extra-special kind of screwing up to fall from that good of a beginning. WOU was them with a little help from food poisoning. Messing up at OSU was all me. Now I’m face to face with the fact that OSU didn’t teach me what I need to know, that I don’t know how to find the answer now, and that I’ve got nothing left.
I can’t be a “seven-year burnout” in the classical sense, leaving the field that fast, because there’s nothing else I can do to make my way. But it sure does seem like I’m not going to be as good at this as I was supposed to be.
I will not cry. No matter how much I want to, no matter how much my throat aches from holding it in, I will discipline myself against that weakness that solves nothing. I will find the strength that got me into and through Chemeketa, the focus that made it easy–and even the illusion that it mattered, because obviously not having that illusion is a problem.