Four years ago today I graduated from my doctoral program. Something about graduation season always makes me feel queasy. I had my first anxiety attack the night before my high school graduation. A year later, I broke up with my high school boyfriend a week before his college graduation (we were way too serious for our age, but we seriously thought we were going to get married the following year). I associate graduations with this raw, sleep-deprived feeling that I’m staring over the edge of a flat earth into some kind of abyss.
And that sounds way too melodramatic. I’m just trying to figure out where this queasy feeling is coming from. I’m nervous about the coming summer, to be sure, but it doesn’t really seem like it should be as scary as it feels. Last summer was such an emotional low point, I don’t want to go through that again. But I’m starting to have the same kind of insomnia again, mired in self-recrimination over things that happened *years* ago. It makes no sense to my waking brain but I’m having a hard time shutting it off.
Movable Type 