Closure

My mood has changed significantly since Wednesday. I've gone from feeling capable and optimistic to defeated. I'm having my usual Sunday depressive symptoms, which involves guilt about failing to accomplish half of my goals and anxiety about how to handle the upcoming week. I did a lot of writing this weekend. I should take a moment to feel proud, but instead I feel worthless and lazy because I didn't accomplish enough. Although, I have to believe taking three English classes can mess with anyone's mental health especially when one involves working on my book. Don't get me wrong, I love working on my book, but I take it so seriously that it consumes me. I only meet with my professor two more times, and I'm supposed be ready to submit my third chapter to lit journals when we conclude. I don't even have a full draft of the chapter completed yet, let alone started polishing. I have an entire fiction story due Tuesday. After scrapping two stories and a couple weeks of work, I'm finally working on one I like. Writing a complete short story in one weekend where I'm also supposed to be wrapping up my chapter and writing Victorian literature papers--not to mention reading hundreds of pages. I haven't even thought about final exams. I'm just taking it one week at a time; one day at a time; one breath at a time.

I'm loving having my friend from MN in town again. I felt less depressed after we met up in the coffee shop today. We're both still there, but I'm working while she visits with other friends. She leaves to go home Tuesday and then moves to Mexico shortly. I don't know when I'll see her next. Those type of goodbyes are the worst--not knowing when to expect a reunion. I know I've said it before, but it blows me away how the older I get, the more goodbyes there are to say and the more intense they become. It seems growing up means saying goodbye. It makes sense, I guess. I mean everyone dies in the end, which can be considered the ultimate form of goodbye. We can't escape goodbyes, so it should have been obvious that aging creates more goodbyes. I don't know why I felt struck down by that realization. I suppose I just didn't understand the complexity of goodbyes as a child. Not to mention, I knew less people outside of my family that I had to say goodbye to.

Goodbyes relate to closure, the topic of our staff meeting on Friday. My boss talked about how she struggles with closure in many ways. A group of coworkers gave a presentation on the importance of providing closure when we end our sessions. We all agreed we hadn't thought much about it and that people will remember most how they felt when they left. In the meeting, I realized I have trouble with closure in every aspect of my life, but I handle closing my sessions rather well. I think I use my discomfort from past experiences of awkward goodbyes and closings that I go out of my way to make sure my student feels confident and comfortable when we part. College classes rarely have closure. Either everyone takes an exam in silence and leaves on their own time or stops by on their own time to turn in a portfolio. Every now and then I've had classes that don't have an exam, but we still meet to conclude everything. I like that because otherwise, I go from seeing these professors and classmates twice a week to losing all contact.

Talking about abrupt endings also gets me thinking about how unbalanced life in college can be. It goes from one extreme to the other. For example, I usually go through a little post-exams depression. I attribute that to the fact that I'm so ungodly busy for weeks that I don't have time to think about anything, and then all of a sudden, I have nothing at all to do. I'm usually too burnt out to read or write, which are my normal leisurely past times. Instead, I spend my days sleeping, staring at the ceiling, and checking my e-mail every second, often getting down that no one has e-mailed. I then ruminate on the fact that everyone has a life but me and get into some sort of existential crisis where I wonder my purpose in life. College involves some nights of little sleep and then other times where you can sleep all day. Of course I can't forget to mention the unbalanced, extreme drinking mindset in college towns. I'm usually pretty good about pacing myself, but it can be difficult to handle everyone else getting trashed or people buying me drinks without asking me. Then I feel obligated to drink them, because they paid money for it just for me, and I feel ungrateful if I refuse it. I need to be stronger willed about that. I'm sure it relates to my passivity as a woman in this culture and how I don't know how to worry about myself more than others. This can be observed by my unbalanced eating as well. Not only do I eat an unbalanced diet, but I eat at all different times. I often go all day without eating during the week before exams because I am working so hard I forget to eat. Then at night, I am dizzy and in a terrible mood.

I'm off to work on homework. Although, just to set the mood for what I'm working on, I'll include an excerpt from the bio about Oscar Wilde that can be found in my Oxford Anthology: Victorian Prose and Poetry book. I'm writing one of my class journals about his piece, "The Importance of Being Earnest." The end of the biography's first paragraph, which begins by raving about his accomplishments and talent, reads "At the height of his triumph, disaster befell him: he was indicted for homosexual practices, found guilty, and sentenced to two years at hard labor; he emerged from prison a broken man, bereft of position, hope, and talent. He died solitary and destitute in a shabby hotel ' in Paris." Wow. What a horrible end to life. I hope to never experience anything like that.