Why Chocolate Doesn't Do the Trick During a Week Like This

Still no Internet. I know you are as upset by this news as I am. My most fervent Christmas wish of late is that the Internet will return to grace my life with its presence. I can only hope. I'd like to believe I'm not addicted to it, but I would be lying and we all know where lying takes you. (Pssst! H-E-double hockey sticks for the untaught among us.)

It is Friday night, late, and I FINALLY took my final. The anxiety level in my life has decreased from ULTRA HIGH AND COMPLETELY UNBEARABLE to INTENSE BUT BEARABLE. I must thrive on anxiety for as much as I milk it and coax it and welcome it into my home and heart. It is like a lover who courts and woos me with the constant plying of attention and devotion and proclamations of undying commitment. I can't let go of it. And it certainly seems enamored with me. It is not a mutually agreeable relationship but it is the most long-term relationship I've been in to date. And sometimes misery as your only company must satisfy as company indeed.

Despite the conclusions I will come to later in this paragraph, I am not lacking in the intelligence department. I'm not stupid. But I certainly enter a wild and weird vortex of high anxiety when it comes to taking tests or writing papers. I enter the paralyzing grip of perfectionism thinking that every word must be perfect and every paragraph pristine and every thought vetted at the highest levels of national, regional and personal, emotional security before it can be graded. I can map out a thousand ways in my brain that I could have or should have or would have done it differently if I only had more time. Those thousands of detailed maps overtake my brain so that actually learning material or writing material takes a back seat to how I actually could work the material into a better form if I could only get rid of the anxiety and focus on the material for longer than intervals of a half a second every three hours between naps, email, errands, work, phone calls, bills, or absolutely any other task that can distract me from thinking about said material long enough that I don't hyperventilate. (That was probably a run-on sentence of abhorrent length, but I will not correct it. I will not, I will not, I will not.)

Eventually I'm so worn out from trying to avoid the anxiety, that I succumb to mediocrity and turn in half-thought papers and take tests poorly. And once again I sail quietly through life with a full brain, a grieving heart, and hiding my light under a bushel. Or should I say, I'm a magician at turning a simple test into a life-or-death drama for the ages. It takes all kinds of people to make this world go 'round. And then some of us are just round people. Round people with high anxiety levels that even a double chocolate super brownie sundae can't ease.

And you ask, why then are you going back to school?

I have no idea.