lost and insecure [you found me]

I don't know what I'm hoping to get out of life, much less this blog.  Like others, I'm torn between living and recording the motions.  There's a time and place for sharing and sometimes life's momentum just gets to whirring and buzzing and humming all at once and you're swept along in the swiftness of it.  This has mostly been attributed to the end of the semester.  In a few words, grad school is a hell of a lot more than I ever expected.  It not only engulfed me in its currents, but it held me under turbulent waves for much of the latter half of 16 weeks.  There are a dozen other trials that have kept my stress levels at maximum capacity, but it's probably better not to air it all right now for reasons of op-sec and patience.  

Though the blog halted, life goes on.  I'm waiting on my grades and anticipating A's.  I surprised myself and a handful of professors.  I made a new family of fellow english grad students and made a homey little nest out of our one, lone conference room.  I know Louise Erdrich better than she may know herself.  I know the Cult of True Womanhood to degrees of nauseam.  I fell in love with the ideals of the Expressivist movement led by Elbow and Murray.  I wrote my first short story and again surprised myself.  I did a number of seemingly unconquerable tasks and crushed them beneath my tiny feet.  

I keep thinking about that Eleanor Roosevelt quote: "You must do the thing you think you cannot do."  I believe that idea alone sums up the year.  I finally graduated college.  I survived months and months of army induced separation and survived.  I somehow defied all notions of feasibility by getting into this masters program on such short notice, and beyond that, I have excelled.  Those are the hills that I've climbed, leaving the horizon speckled with far-off flags bearing my crest -- pink and flowery, for sure.  The mountains, however, await, standing rugged, impossibly tall and taunting. 

 Next year is coming all too strong and quickly, like a train whose force makes the earth tremble long before arriving.  This is my life now.  There is no turning back.  It's ironic how badly I want it and also how fiercely I dread it.  I have to keep looking back on the achievements, on the things I never thought I could actually pull off until I landed on the other side of Trying and the ride was over and I was still intact.  Love and wanting are tangled in some powerful magic, and perhaps I am a little stronger than I thought.  But I won't admit it often, for it isn't often that I feel it might be true.