True Stories of Academia and Anxiety

One time, I needed to buy several textbooks. After taking over an hour to figure out whether I should buy them from my lovely neighborhood Powell’s or Amazon, I settled on a method that maximized use of my Powell’s card but still allowed me to get the books that Powell’s did not have, like Editing Canadian English. All five books would be shipping from different locations, as close as Oregon and as far away as “International Warehouse,” which a cherubic Powell’s employee informed me is in the United Kingdom.

There was the time I failed to take shipping time into account, because I’m used to picking everything up at Powell’s. This gave me even less time than I already had given myself to absorb a lot of dense material.

Then there was the time where I had lost almost all faith in my academic ability and every time I thought about cracking a scholarly book I worried about whether I had lost my academic focus, drive, and tenacity in the nearly ten years since I was last a full-time student. After all, it was so much easier to read People of WalMart than Essentials of Accounting. The anxiety was making me procrastinate. And procrastinators go to PSU.

But then maybe I wanted to go to PSU. It would certainly be the safe option. But part of this was about expanding one’s horizons in the larger sense, which is one thing safety does not do.

Finally, there was the time that despite feeling like I was finally starting to be happy with myself and connect with other people in a good way…suddenly I felt like I was utterly alone again in a personal quest to climb the ivory tower.

Oh wait. That all happened yesterday.