I got sick, and then I got sicker. I spent most of this past week in bed. And then I made some choices. Yes, it has been a week of major life decisions made under the influence of a fever. Don't be alarmed.

I dropped a class. I'd been thinking about this since the middle of last term. I am in a graduate program, and had been (until last night) taking the maximum course load - which alone is an absurd amount of work, because that's what you sign up for when you go to grad school. On top of this, I have two big extracurricular commitments. And, in the midst of several (like, a small truckload of) panic attacks, I considered (a small truckload of times) finding a way to lessen the extracurricular load. In those moments, it seemed like the most acceptable course of action - because, I thought, I am in school and so my priority should be doing my schoolwork. Full stop.

But I couldn't drop the extras - not because it wasn't possible, but because I didn't want to. The things I do in my spare time are huge sources of joy, and they're also, in their own ways, important parts of how I want to spend my life. They may not be giving me a master's degree, but I learn as much from them as I do from my classes, and I feel like they are equally important in helping me to, you know, grow as a human. I couldn't imagine giving these things up in the interest of doing more schoolwork. It would have been too sad.

And I have been able to balance all of it, but it's been hard. A look at my schedule on any given day would show you that. It works, but barely. I've barely begun the term, and I've already managed to get sick enough to incapacitate myself for the better part of a week. I don't sleep, or can't because I am afraid of forgetting something. It doesn't matter how much you love the things you do when the sheer volume of them makes you feel like you'll collapse. This isn't how I want my life to be.

In my classes, I spent a lot of time worrying that I was scraping through at the expense of actually learning a whole lot. I wrote earlier this week that I was overcommitted, and I feared that my determination to do everything would come at the expense of doing any one thing well. I've proven that I'm capable of juggling this much, but at what cost? I'm in a program designed to prepare me for a career, and right now I am spitting out the work - because I know that I can - without ever really learning the material. My grades are high - I say I'm "scraping through," but I know that I am not objectively failing at anything. I am weirdly blessed with the ability to pull my assignments out of thin air at the last minute, and this has never not worked out for me, but it isn't a measure of what I actually know.

And I wrote that I thought I needed more discipline. I thought that if I just worked harder, maybe faster, it would be possible to create the time to rest. But that isn't true. The work will never stop. This isn't a bad thing - this is adulthood - but making work my entire life is not the answer. It's not the sort of thing where if you make it your entire life for long enough, you eventually do all the work there is to do and then it goes away. I'm not buying myself free time for the future by filling every moment of the two years that I'm here. All I'm doing is making myself tired. And sick. And possibly a little crazy.

So I've dropped a class. It isn't because my non-school life is too much, and it isn't because I can't work hard enough, and it isn't because my grades are suffering: I just want to slow down. I need to slow down. Choosing my life can't stop at filling it with things that matter to me - I must also learn how to do those things well, and with care.

This is, I think, the beginning of a different way of understanding how to spend my time. I am allowed to want to enjoy my life, and I am allowed to want to do things well, even if that means doing some of them slowly. I know I may not always have this kind of freedom, but I have it now, and I am going to use it.

This morning, for the first time in five months of grad school, I woke up without struggling against the weight of the tasks of the day. For me, this alone is worth having to take a class or two in summer school. The relief is enough to make me cry.

h.

It is Monday morning and I am in class and it is pouring rain in January. I am sick. There is some sort of awful cold-type thing making its way through our house and today it has settled into my chest. Glory hallelujah. I have an hour left of this lecture and I’m disturbing everyone by blowing my nose. Sorry.

It has been a hard few weeks. I am undeniably overcommitted and trying to make it all work, and I know I will find a way, because there’s always a way, but I’m afraid of doing too many things at the expense of doing any one of them well.

I am learning how my days must go, how in the midst of all the big undertakings there must still be time for the little things I love so much, no matter how overwhelmed I feel by certain tasks. I will not lose time for writing letters, for drawings, for reading, for walks. I am considering this term an exercise in discipline, in quiet joy.

Quiet joy because quiet is the only way I know how to do anything, not because its stillness makes it somehow less.    

h.

I woke up to snow and was secretly thrilled. I never thought I'd long for snow, but not having it has made me a strange sort of sad. Yesterday I traipsed around the city in the rain and would have given anything for some fat, white flakes instead. I feel a quiet glee when snow falls. It comes from suspecting that all the glittering front yards and driveways are not the product of science, but of some kind of sorcery - from feeling closer than ever to being let into the unnamable other world I am certain exists in tandem with my own. 

And then today everything was white. Snow. I watched it blow in clouds across the tops of buildings, opened my window and breathed it in as it gathered on the sill. 

Last year, when it snowed for the first time, I promised myself that I would spend every first snow of the year doing nothing but reading the Chronicles of Narnia and looking out the window, even if it meant I had to drop a million important things. I was only half joking when I said it. It felt like kind of a perfect personal tradition. Today I had neither the time nor the Narnia (I left most of my books at my parents' house), but wished that I had both.

But I spent the first part of the day reading the book I did have (Karen Connelly's Touch the Dragon, which regularly makes me cry) and counting snowflakes, and by next week I'll be complaining about the cold but for now it feels like magic.

h. 

And just like that, I'm back. From the aisle seat of the airplane, I stole glimpses out open windows and watched familiar brown fields turn into clouds, and then into city lights blooming like a galaxy beneath me. I walked home from the subway station pulling my suitcase behind me and almost forgot the codes to the front door. I was sadder to leave than I expected, not because I would miss anything but because in folding and packing and flying and saying goodbye I felt, briefly, the ache of being in between. I have so thoroughly outgrown my life with my family, but I am still growing into my life here, and for a few moments this afternoon I felt like all I had was nowhere. 

But that isn't true. In the airport I watched planes roar in and wrote pages in a journal I have barely touched in weeks, and as I flew from there to here I spent three hours reading prose that made me want to cry and laugh and trade my whole life for pens and paper, and I made faces at the curly golden baby sitting one seat behind me, and I tried to find the right word to describe the sky as it began to blush pink, and wherever I am I will have this place within me, always. Everywhere. So it's okay. 

h.