Going Back to School

TL;DR - nerves about grad school, work, life, grief, illness, and writing

Tomorrow I start back to Grad School with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign online LEEP program working towards a Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree after taking a year off. I'm only taking one class called, "Community Engagement" and I'm really looking forward to it.

But I'm also nervous. Not nervous like I was when I started since I'd been out of school for several years and it was my first time doing any Graduate classes. But nervous that my concentration / focus isn't what it was due to my grief about Joy being killed, my two cats dying, and other life concerns like Kess having cancer and Bek breaking her humorous, though not her humor, making me feel more fragile than I know myself to be. I've also found, with the help of therapy, that I am mourning my mom since when she died, the family was consumed with making sure Joy was taken care of and I never really mourned her at that time.

This mourning, grief, and worry has stolen my focus, my sleep, given me nightmares, and taken my occasional migraines into the realm of chronic migraines. Don't get me wrong, I am ever so grateful and delighted that my bestie and my sister have both recovered. I am blessed that my job and my school have been so understanding of my circumstances. And I feel ever so loved by family and friends. But I still am grieving and I feel guilty for it going so long since I am just a bystander in all of this - it was not my body being crushed, having cancer, breaking, dying... Then, on top of that, I feel bad for feeling guilty because there is no timeline on grief. It's a vicious cycle of grief and guilt. (And yes, I'm in therapy. My therapist is awesome and helping me through this.) My other concern is that I know I need to make time to write even with work and animal care and grad school. My writing has been vital for me staying above the waters of deepest depression that I nearly died in a few years after Joy's rafting accident. I cannot and will not slide into those waters.

I had hoped to get my room rearranged and cleaned before my class started. But I have been sick and the migraines have kicked up a notch (which happens when all three of my main triggers - stress, hormones, and weather shift - hit me at the same time, especially when I'm sick) so my free time, including the weekend I had off, has been spent in bed. I'm trying to be okay with that. SELF-CARE is my mantra. I also keep reminding myself that yes, I am more than halfway through the MLIS program, I have all 'A's, and, when I started, I was working 2 jobs and taking double the course load, so I can do this.

I CAN DO THIS

I WILL DO THIS

*breathe*

A Look Back on Writing in 2019 & 2020 Goals for Writing

Even though 2019 was a rough year, one thing I did really well was making sure I had time to write and I wrote. I did not write every day, but I definitely wrote several times every week. I had been trying that "treat it as a job" approach for over a year, but it wasn't working for me. It sucked all the passion out of writing and I felt guilty if I didn't write during the times I had set aside due to a migraine or whatever. So I decided to try the "I Will Write Every Week" approach. Basically, writing became my place to relax and unwind. I was still writing down times to write in my planner, but it wasn't a, "YOU MUST DO THIS OR YOU FAIL AS A WRITER" type mentality. It was more, "hey, look at all this time you have to write! I know there's a lot going on, but once you get done with the stuff you HAVE to do, look at this fun thing you GET to do." Just a shift in perception and it made all the difference. It also helped that I had/have my writing groups and open mics as deadlines keeping me accountable. This is what I succeeded at this past year:

• Wrote every week
• Wrote every day for November & surpassed the 50,000 word mark for NaNoWriMo
• Sent out one Short Story (It got rejected, but with some pointers on how to fix the story so I'm seeing that as a win)
• Set up and started a Grief Journaling Workshop at the Library
• Continued with the Writers' Word Feast
• Visited an open mic I wasn't running
• Ran The No Shush Salon open mic
• Finished my memoir & gathered readers

Here are my writing goals for 2020:

• Send my memoir to my readers (Edit: DONE)
• Continue writing every week
• Send out writing for publication at least once a month
• Visit other (not run by me) writing groups
• Visit other (not run by me) open mics
• After getting back feedback from readers about my memoir (March 1), Edit it
• Figure out what direction I want to go with my memoir & go there