My husband and I went on a wonderful, almost week-long trip for a friend's wedding, and relished the opportunity to play tourist for a few days, meet new friends, and celebrate our friend's wedding. We were pretty prepared for most things while we were there, but I was definitely not prepared to come back to school.
Everything probably would have been fine if I had taken care of school stuff before we left. I didn't compensate for the time we would be gone, and just got further behind. This is how departure day went:
- Get up early to write the big assignments for class.
- Panic because I don't have enough time and don't feel confident in what I'm doing.
- Alternate between fretting anxiously and trying to make progress.
- Skip class to pack and study for the huge midterm that I have to take before leaving.
- Continue praying even harder for things to work out.
- Try to clean the house (including the fridge) so we can leave it for a week.
- Go to take the big midterm (and get a 97%!).
- Immediately pick up my husband from campus.
- Drive a couple hours north to visit with my sister for a couple hours while she opens her mission call.
- Drive the car to Grandma's house.
- Ride to the airport with Grandma.
- Catch a couple red-eye flights and try to get a couple hours of sleep on the plane.
- Arrive the following morning and sight-see for the day until we can collapse and sleep later that night.
It was a really long day.
Fast forward to this morning: I intend to do the reading and possibly writing assignments for today, but realize that I don't have the instructions for these writing assignments (since I missed class). I procrastinate doing anything until too late anyway; normally, I would skip class to work on it (which rarely works), but since I missed the last class I really need to show up today.
Things go fine at first, then it's time to swap papers for peer reviews. I join in and let the people behind me know that I don't have a paper to pass back. I manage to pass it off lightly, and don't get embarrassed yet; I just evaluate the papers that cross my desk like everyone else's. On the fourth or fifth rotation, someone calls out, "I don't have a paper to review" (because of the gap that I left). The professor tries to sort out the confusion, and I have to raise my hand and explain that I didn't bring a paper. My professor takes the paper I was about to review and passes it to the girl who brought her homework to class, and I'm left with flushed cheeks, downcast eyes, and little to do for the rest of class except beat myself up inside.
Before class today, I knew I was getting behind. My plan to fix it was to keep up on current assignments and work with the TA to cover the assignments I missed. Now I'm afraid of falling into the same trap I encounter every semester--a terrible feedback cycle of getting increasingly behind, feeling increasingly worse about myself, and becoming paralyzed by anxiety and fear. Even when I have a good start to the semester, like with this class, it always seems to end the same way. Maybe I should request an appointment with this professor to discuss my situation and hope that it goes better than the last time I tried that. I'm afraid of history repeating itself, and I just don't know how to move forward.
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