Lately

School is going to be the death and making of me.

It's been leaving me with an anxiety over the next time I'm asked about what I've been up to, what's new, or how I've been. Inside the response lies a cyclical life crisis in danger of emerging in the middle of a social gathering when all you wanted was to pass the time politely with me who is so out of social practice that I'm loitering at the food table.

Bless your heart. I'll be optimistic. Truly I will! Julie Andrew's kind of optimistic. 

In the back of my mind is the guilt that I don't deserve to go out and see the sunlight unless it's to and from my classroom for all the reading and studying I put off thanks to my addiction to Asian dramas and Bollywood. More like my addiction to escaping stress. Because every time I come back to the reality of careplans and diseases I end up suspicious my community college diploma will actually state AAS Degree in Human Misery (with no clue how to alleviate it).
You search for inspiration. You try to remember why you chose this in the beginning. Then you hit a surge of motivation in the morning and the remembrance of what it feels like to have a purpose in your sacrifice brings you to joyful tears of relief...

"I...I think I get it. I think I actually retained that information. The life crisis cycle is over! Aha! I DO have a purpose!" 

Until the inspiration dissipates like a fart and you realize the zeal was just motivational gas because no matter what your brilliant rationale of nursing care was that day there is always another intervention that should have been priority and now you don't even trust yourself with your own toothbrush for fear you don't know how to hold it.

This is every day.
(pardon the french)

My coping mechanism is to foster life-plan B of living as a hermit in the Grand Canyon if I can't ever succeed as a nurse (which makes me secretly hope I'll fail). But too late to quit now. Not even the imagined dark void of any and every disaster happening on the first day of being a graduate nurse can make me leave the one year I have left. Right? If not then at least it's only one year till I can adopt that hermit position. Hazzah?!