I've lost my motivation and my focus. I don't know exactly when it happened or where it happened or why it happened. I don't know why everything that's so important to me has fallen from the scope of importance and become less-than-important, nothing, not even a blip on the radar. This is not a good thing, and this is all happening at the worst possible time.
I just looked over my blog. More than 150 posts in 2009, considerably less for all of last year, and here we are: the beginning of the last full week of February, 2011, and I'm only just now posting to this online journal that I'd once intended to spend so much time keeping up with, that I've made several re-commitments to revamping and revitalizing and renewing my energies to enrich. This blog is a badge, a metaphor for the shaky hold that I seem to be losing on my goals and ambitions and daily routine.
I'm behind in all my classes, which is the placement in the race where I've spent most of this spring semester. Behind in reading every textbook, behind in discussion board posts, behind in really learning this crucial information that is so important to me in the grand scheme of the life I'm planning to lead.
I think that my attitude and outlook really began to go south sometime last semester. In November, I realized that the corrective surgery for the debilitating lumbago was going to put me out longer than I was hoping. Of course, everything really seemed okay because I'd just started seeing this really great guy that was capturing my attention and energy and idealism. Unfortunately, the concept of falling in love can really put the blinders on those of us who are otherwise unaccustomed to the possibility. My blinders went up sometime in early November with Macbeth and regular Saturday nights and something new and daring and different and engrossing. Something I've never really experienced previously (thought I had, but I was wrong). Then the bumps started popping up. I hit one roadblock. Then another. Then another. Then another. Oddly enough, I didn't notice a single one of them until the blocks grew so large that they became unavoidable for me to overlook.
The phone call from the physician's office. Insurance was going to cover maybe fifteen percent of this surgery and the only way I would be able to go through with it would be to cough up an amount that's pretty close to the gross income I have for an entire year. The surgery went out to the back burner and I had to learn to deal with the daily distraction of constant pain that ebbs and flows but never totally leaves. Ibuprofen became my best friend, and I can now look back and write that I probably take anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 mg. of the stuff every day. I wonder what the lining of my stomach has to say about the level...if it's still able to speak.
I struggled with finals after the crash of my laptop, losing everything that I so often relied on in the daily rigamarole of routine. I ended up with a B in the 3030 Nursing class that had occupied so much of my time. I overdrew my checking account for the first time in more than four years (but it wouldn't be the last time - once you've dipped into the red from the black [or is it the black from the red???], it can be difficult and time consuming to find some degree of financial recovery and re-accountability). I had no money for Christmas, which was vastly approaching. For Thanksgiving, I had to spend the day by myself, cooking a meal that I really didn't want to eat, all the while with a sick and sad and sort of lost feeling in my stomach. I got the PRN position at Promise, a spot at which I was continually taken advantage of for the following month and a half. I got a really bad cold that got better for three days before I re-succombed to what I now assume may have been closer to the flu.
December sucked, but I made it to the holiday break, which arrived with a letter from the Louisiana State Board of Nursing that requested additional information to accompany my application which was originally submitted two and a half months before. Of course, the day I received the letter was the first day that campus was to close for two weeks. In spite of gathering all the necessary information and spending another hundred bucks on copies and collations and notaries and mailing fees, I could only wait and hope that all would be reviewed and accepted in time for January 4th, the first day of the rest of my life, the day I'd been waiting two years to reach, the day I'd worked twice as hard and three times as feverishly to attain: orientation for first level baccalaureate students at the NSU College of Nursing.
The Saturday before New Year's Eve, I was out with the man I assumed was becoming my boyfriend, the man I realized I was falling for harder than I've ever fallen for anyone in my past. In my striking state of sobriety, I watched him making out with another guy on the dancefloor not once, but twice, and I endured the harsh barrage of caustic words that he decided to lay in my direction, as if it were my fault that his inebriation leads him to doing things he might not do otherwise. It was here, in my state of confusion, lost in a feeling of uncertainty, in a world where I wasn't really sure which end was up and what was right and good, he told me that he'd be spending the coming new year with his ex-boyfriend, a dude with whom he felt he was still in love.
I wanted to make the most of things and put my foot down to end the relationship before it went another step further and I dropped any more emotinal attachment on something about which I was suddenly certainly uncertain. The break went continued on its dizzying drift through desolation. I welcomed its finality despite the fact that the spring semester was swiftly approaching and I hadn't a cent to pay for the new scrubs and the patches and the white shoes and the blood pressure cuff and the books and the applications and the new laptop and the iPhone (or iPod Touch - either way, two to four hundred dollars) and the pen light and the clipboard and the SNA renewall and the long list of other crap that one has to try to pay for at the one moment one can least afford it. The new year arrived as did Monday, January 3rd and a phone call from the director of the Baccalaureate program at NSU, who'd received the same information I'd received weeks before from the board of nursing. Although everything requested had been remitted to the board, I would be ineligible to begin clinical courses without a written consent of my clearing from the board to the school. Although it may sound like an easy item to attain, the time was limited. I had until Thursday morning at eight or I would be dropped. The phone calls were desperately made. The necessary members of the LSBN necessary to review my folder were out. I was dropped from clinical classes for the semester.
Later that day, I broke off the trail of uncertainty I had embarked on with my Macbethish mate when he called to reiterate that he was still in love with the ex who now lives halfway around the world. Yet another example of information that might have been more useful to me weeks before. My only option was to enroll in all online classes that would satisfy degree requirements for the secondary major I'd insisted on matriculating toward despite the reservations of advisors and friends in the more important nursing program.
And then the first snowstorm came. And with the ice and the road closures and warnings of hazardous travel, the Macbethish mate arrived and re-ignited passion that I'd assumed was lost. Actual classes for the spring semester began on Tuesday the eleventh instead of Monday the tenth. Every textbook assigned for every one of my classes was delayed. One for two weeks, one for nearly four weeks. The PRN position I'd taken at Promise had not guaranteed hardly any of the shifts I'd signed up to work - despite being told that I need only sign up to work and then come in, there were fourteen shifts for which I showed up when I was nowhere to be found on the schedule upon arrival.
And so the theme music for the spring semester had begun. And I don't think I've yet to find recovery from the series of setbacks, failures, and other inconsistencies with the historically gentle flow of my life. Distractions in the form of regular, daily, sometimes debilitating pain. Distractions in the form of a boyfriend who intermittently tells me that he loves me and wants us to be together and then calls to tell me that he spent the last night out getting drunk and naked and nubile with somebody else the night before. Distractions in the form of a long list of people who seem to have no problem depending on me, but never seem to be available when I'd like to request the favor returned. Distractions in the form of a generally negative outlook on reading and writing and posting and discussing and completing assignments.
I no longer know what I'm doing, and I don't know how to re-orient myself to find the clever pace that brought me to this point. I no longer know that I want to continue nursing school. I no longer want to have to continually prove my sobriety and explain myself for everything that I did in my life six or seven or eight years ago, everything that I've worked so hard to move beyond and amend. I no longer know that love is a reality. I no longer have faith in my fellows in life. I no longer have access to the rose-colored glasses that I spent the first five years of my recovery donning every morning before putting my feet on the floor beside my bed.
I only keep hoping that maybe, just maybe, I'll get some words out, some thoughts out, pass some negative nancy energy out of my brain and body and psyche and be able to start tomorrow with a new lease on life and living and learning to love all the little things that once mattered so much.
The truth is: I'm tired. I'm very, very tired. And I really hope that the only thing that separates me from a truly horrible weekend and the first best week of the year is a good night's sleep.
