A Day

Oh. Em. Gee. Large chunks of time have gone missing from this month already. I am averaging well below my happy place of 8 or 9 hours of sleep at night, I haven't worked out in a week, and my right eyelid has been twitching every day for the past 14 days. I can practically feel the cortisol coursing through my veins and my acne has never, ever been so bad. I'm a hot mess. Today I can't help but wonder: When do you stop saying, this is just a season, and start acknowledging, this is my life?

I want to shout, "I'm not really like this" every time I complain to someone about how busy I am. While that may have been true for a while, I have to face the facts. For now, at least, this is my life. This spilling-over-at-the-seams-and-not-necessarily-in-a-good-way modus operandi appears to be here to stay. I want to be reasonable about it, but it's really hard for me to admit this as I face the reality that I'm about to turn in a really, really half-assed paper.

Let me clarify, lest you think I'm some straight-A stick-in-the-mud. I'm not. I'm so not. Nursing school wiped that notion off the board entirely and my middle name became Avoidance. I've been treating grad school as a way to redeem my undergraduate academic habits, even though I know that's placing unreasonable expectations on myself given two jobs and a marriage that are now part of the picture.

I'm now 5 classes into grad school and, for the first time, procrastination is my true and real foe. Until this week, procrastination had the happy side-effect of somehow brute-forcing a high-quality paper. But today? This sheer and utter exhaustion and nonstop schedule has left me scrambling to write a literature review at the last minute (well, I'm about 8 hours in and I have 2 hours and 3 minutes until the literal last minute). And you know what? After all that, this paper is going to be sub-par at best. I can barely focus my twitchy eyes on the screen. My butt actually hurts from sitting for so long today. Even my customary snack breaks (which will be the death of my jeans this winter, by the way) have lost their allure.

It's hard to settle for less than perfection, to just feel overwhelmed when it gets to the point that I couldn't do anything about it even if I did muster up the energy to try. For all my complaining over the past 10 months, today was the first day I really and truly thought about dropping it all. Screw grad school. Try as I might, I just can't seem to reset myself for a higher capacity just because life starts demanding more of me!

Today while I was driving across town to and from class, I was listening to a sermon on my iPod. This Kevin Cawley quote hit me: "If the entirety of your life isn't about God's glory, the entirety of your life will disappoint you." I feel this truth in the depth of my soul, but I'm unsure about how to respond to it minute-by-minute. Can I just hide in my closet and read books about God all day? (Because that sounds amazing). I don't think that's the answer. I think the answer lies along the more practical lines of something as simple as keeping my journal and Bible right next to my bed so I can do Bible study before I roll out of bed and face the assault of 1,000 temptations and distractions.

And because I did start my day in the Word (and I plan to end it that way as well), I'm going to count it as a success. Everything in between was a train wreck. Today, simply Not Avoiding was an achievement in itself.

One hour and 38 minutes left.