Rx bottle

Sometimes when you are hiking barefoot you need to put on a pair of shoes. This is one of the things I have learned so far during these nearly two weeks in Los Angeles.

I am so homesick, so much more painfully than I anticipated. I thought I would luxuriate in having a quiet room and a bed to myself for 12 nights, but instead I sleep barely at all and anxiety has taken up permanent residence in my throat.

I turn on the TV and mute it just for the sense that the silent people on the screen in the corner of my right eye are here with me too.

I think partly I am scared of being evaluated after so many years of being (to an extent) the sole arbiter of my success

I think partly I am overwhelmed by the pressure to live up to the standard established by my former student self: unmitigated perfection

Of course I am not perfect now and I wasn't then, not in any way other than grades on paper, and today I'm a wiser and more conscious and more self-aware person and I can breathe into that and feel my feet on the ground and remember who I am and provide my own validation

Also I am stressed about time--about getting it all done when I am feeling in many respects so utterly burnt out

Probably more than anything else it's that I want this so badly, and I did it. I'm here. And because happiness or "getting" what I have for so long wanted, for lack of a more articulate way to say it at the end of this long and sleep-deprived day, feels so foreign to me that whenever I do feel it I quickly begin feeling the anticipatory pain of losing it

Maybe I don't need to assume that everything good that happens to me will soon be gone

Maybe I should keep my focus on the reality of my situation at this moment, which is that I am endlessly lucky and enormously grateful