Reflection: Grad school so far.

I’m entering my third week of grad school (online-only this semester because of the move) and man, it’s been a wild ride. I’m only taking two courses–Lifespan Development and Theories of Counseling and Psychotherapy, both of which I’ve had before in undergrad, so I’m familiar with the content. It’s a good thing I’m not struggling with that because the workload is something I was unprepared for, having been out of school for five years now.

Every day, I set aside two or three hours for work. Mondays are reading days, primarily. Both of my classes are heavy on Blackboard discussion posts, so I usually knock out a few of those on Mondays as well. My Theories class requires participation on four separate days, so I try to space out the rest of my posts throughout the week along with my papers.

Lifespan’s discussions are pretty research-heavy (as in, find an article based on these criteria and summarize it), which is something I’ve always hated. Thankfully, the summaries only have to be a paragraph or two, but I always overshoot in terms of length on all my written work because I have no idea how to thoroughly break down a twenty-page study into a paragraph.

All told, I probably spend about thirty hours or so per week on school stuff, so I’m thankful that my fella is willing and able to support my lack of a job right now–there’s no way I’d be able to maintain my mental health/overall sanity along with a full-time job plus the school stuff. My only concern is that I won’t be able to find another school in Baltimore that will take me sans the psychology undergrad (despite grad school credits in the field).

My plan once we move is to take a semester off to scout out schools and perhaps get back into the tutoring game to earn a little cash on the side. Aside from that, I’m just trying to chill out and get ready for the big move in a few weeks!

How are your summers going so far, readers? Are you taking time out for self-care? I hope this post finds you lovely and healthy as always.

The illusion of control.

Last night was, admittedly, a little rough for me. I’m getting over a nasty cold, which always plays hell with my moods, but the day as a whole went pretty well. But around bedtime, I sort of…crumbled. Those old feelings of guilt and worry and nonspecific “bad” began to surface and I lost it for a while.

It should come as no surprise, especially to long-time readers of this blog, that I tend to be a worrier. But here’s the kicker–I don’t worry about bad things happening to me; rather, I worry incessantly about bad things happening to the people I care about.

So, after allowing myself an hour or so to cry and attempt to calm down on my own (I’m finding that the Cross Stitch World app on Facebook is particularly calming) to no avail, I took some lorazepam and settled in for some good old-fashioned Googling. It took a while to find what I was looking for, mostly because I was too jittery and anxious to think clearly enough to come up with the proper search terms, but once I did (“anxiety about bad things happening to loved ones” was particularly fruitful), I stumbled upon a treasure trove of forum posts written by people just like me. And they all had one thing in common: early loss of a loved one, usually a parent, very early in life.

Without revealing too much out of respect for her privacy, my mother was absent from my life from the time I was six years old until I was nineteen. We had contact through letters and the occasional phone call, but the sense of loss I felt was intense. Instead, I was raised by one aunt, my grandmother, and my grandmother’s sister.

I was particularly close to my great-aunt, Muriel (whose name I took as my middle name during my recent name change), and she passed away in 2010 after a long struggle with dementia and congestive heart failure. She moved in with us when I was fourteen after she had a valve replacement and her mental state began to decline; therefore, I witnessed the brutality of dementia over the next six years, when she was moved into a nursing home following my grandmother’s stroke.

I had never lost anyone so close to me in such a final way before. And because of the PTSD, I have an extremely hard time getting close to others on a meaningful, truly intimate level. I’ve discovered that this is the root of my excessive worry.

After giving myself ample time to process what I had read on the forums, comforted by the knowledge that I’m not alone in my struggle, I checked out a few Buddhist-oriented websites that also came up during my search. Most of what I read dealt with giving up the “illusion of control,” something that didn’t particularly make me feel better but did provide some good food for thought. As someone living with C-PTSD, I don’t do well with the unknown because the main reason I’ve survived as long as I have is because I am constantly planning five, six, seven steps in advance. I need to have a plan. I need to know what is going to happen and if I don’t, extreme discomfort sets in. If this discomfort is ignored, it builds into outright anxiety and, well, I end up in situations like the one I was in last night.

The good news about all of this is that I’ve made a note to myself to be more mindful and to really try to stay “in the moment” and enjoy the present instead of worrying so much about the future. I have also identified one of the main things I need to address in therapy–I’m currently in-between therapists since I’m moving in about a month and a half, but plan on finding one as soon as we’re in the Baltimore area.

Readers, can any of you relate? What has worked for you, either in terms of distraction or realizations?