school worries

Sep 3: (Second) Decisions

Second-guessing myself is apparently my best skill.

Due to massive work-load (especially in the Thursday class) and the fact that I kinda don’t actually want to read any of the books assigned for my Monday class, I decided to drop my Monday class. I have been second-guessing myself ever since I made that decision.

“They’ll notice I’m gone because there are so few students.” ”The professor’s feelings will be hurt.” ”It’s going to stay on my transcript as a dropped class.” ”I won’t get the full tuition back.” Et cetera.

I haven’t actually done anything about dropping it yet apart from talk to a few (non-school) people about it.

I feel like I’m totally going to lose it if I try to take both courses, but I can’t stop beating myself up about my decision to drop one of them.

Even though at this point it’s moved from “I want to” to “I have to” because I’ve spent the afternoon not reading the book for next week’s class, and that means that there’s no way I’ll be able to finish it in time to write the paper on it.

And yet I still can’t seem to convince myself that it’s okay to drop the course. I feel like it’s going to make me a quitter. (I suppose there’s no way around feeling that way, though.) I also worry that this means that I’m totally unfit for graduate-level studies.

But what else can I do? It won’t do me any good to stay in the class if I go crazy in trying to get all my work done, right? And if staying in the course means my work in both classes suffers, then that’s not much better. And yet I still feel unsure. My unease is pretty much palpable, but I don’t know what else to do about it.

Part of me thinks “well, I’ll talk to the professor in the Thursday class about it” but what if he tells me that dropping that course would be proving that I don’t have what it takes to survive in the graduate environment?

The worst part about not knowing what to do is that I really don’t have anyone to turn to for advice. My parents are useless on this (my mother only has an undergraduate degree, and my father’s last turn through graduate school was in the 1970s) and it all boils down to finances with them anyway. And my brother’s been having such a rough time of it the last few months that he’s barely coherent, so he’s no help.

And I don’t have any friends or co-workers, so what can I do?

I can type randomly to myself like this, or I can talk to my cats.

As if either of those options is going to help.

It’s right about now that I wish I had a shrink, you know? That would be someone to talk to who might have some idea what to tell me. Except that I know how they operate; they would just say “well, what do you think is best?” even though the whole point is that I don’t know.

And writing all this is making me cry for some reason. I hope that’s just hormones because my period is right around the corner. I don’t want to be crying over something this stupid under normal, non-hormonal circumstances.