Keeping My Hand In

I was doing so well at posting regularly and now...

My only excuse is having been busier than I have been in a year. This is not going to be much of a post; I'm just trying to keep my hand in and not get to far off the habit of posting.

It has been quite a week. After the disaster that was last weekend and Tuesday (panic attack, then hungover on klonopin, then waking up dizzy and ill for no apparent reason on Tuesday and missing classes) I realized that something had to go. I'm glad that I tried to do all of the things I was trying to do but I can't quite do them all. Wednesday night I sat down and tried to decide what to drop. I have to keep all my silly general education courses because otherwise I can't graduate. I'm not going to drop church choir because we're about to get into the Lent and then Easter time of year - the really interesting music time of year - and I wasn't willing to let go of Spanish and the social justice committee. I can't stop working at the gallery. Working there just about saved my life this summer and gave me enough confidence to go back to school; besides, I'm involved in so many worthwhile projects there that it feels immoral to walk away.

There remained only one option. I added up all the hours I spent on non-school things and all the hours I spent on Greek and found that while I spend approximately eleven hours on church and the gallery, I spend seven hours doing homework for Greek and three hours in the actual class. If I dropped Greek, I would cut the amount of time I spent on non-essential school things in half.

So now, sadly, I am no longer studying Homer. I am sorry about it but all of the sudden I felt a thousand times better and I know it was the right thing to do. No sense in running myself into the ground, even for Homer.

It's hard for me to make these decisions. I don't like to let people down so I usually postpone it until I can't do anything at all anymore so that I won't have to feel guilty about it. Of course, this is not the best way to handle things nor does it really stop me from feeling guilty. On the one hand, I have no problem admitting that I have bipolar disorder and that it stops me from being able to do things I want to do sometimes. On the other, I have a hard time accepting this in a day to day fashion. Discerning what it is that I'm doing now that will have a bad effect in the future and then following through by choosing not to carry on doing it anyway is not easy for me. I'm pleased that I've done it this time.