I would just like to publicly announce that I have officially committed to physically going to school on a daily basis. GASP, I know. It's ok if you full-time workers want to laugh at me - I am fully aware of how ridiculous it is and I in fact encourage you to laugh at me. It's a big step for me, however.
I started this past Monday and have successfully attended class every day this week! I'm pretty darn pround of myself, I must admit. It's been rough getting up at 6:30 every day. I used to do it all the time during the year that I worked in Bethesda, but honestly it wasn't easy then and it isn't easy now! I'm really not a morning person! I'm not as bad as my husband tends to be in that department, but getting up early still is NOT my cup of tea. It's good for me though. Third year isn't gonna cut me any slack, and I might as well get used to it.
I also really needed to get out of my isolated bubble. There's not much I can do about the fact that I have to study alone (or the fact that most of my day must be consumed by studying... alone) - I just can't study with other people. FAR too distracting. I might be able to do a group review session right before a test, once I've learned the material well, but in medical school the reality is that you NEVER reach the point where you're comfortable enough with said material to break out of your solitary study bubble and bounce information off of your classmates. You study til the last minute and STILL feel almost completely hopeless walking into the test! So realistically, that means I have to be alone much of the time. That's just freaking depressing. I was beginning to feel that in my life, it might be quite LITERALLY depressing, so I really needed to do something about it. I think I was in the middle of a vicious cycle involving study-induced isolation followed by depression followed by lack of motivation followed by worsening grades followed by further depression and lack of motivation... you get the picture. Going nowhere good. Seeing other human beings (other than strangers at the store/gym and my husband) is so far proving to be quite uplifting in and of itself! Shocking.
It's also freeing up the rest of my day to actually study, which will eventually bear fruit as far as my grades are concerned. One would hope, anyway. I know that I've been operating in a perpetual state of "catch-up" as a result of my previous "strategy" (if you can even call it that!), and it was a lot easier to deny it than to do something about it, so I denied it. I'm still adjusting to the difficulty of "doing something about it" (I'm VERY tired for one, and still trying to figure out exactly how best to use this extra afternoon study time), but if nothing else it just makes me feel good to know that I am, in fact, DOING something about it. And I'm hoping that even just having something to "feel good" about (as relates to school) will start the reversal of that vicious downward spiral from which I'm trying to recover.
My hope is that this (rather large) change, coupled with my sincere attempts lately to slow down, cut the superfluous crap and enjoy what's good about my life (in general), will have an overall calming and uplifting effect. Because honestly, like I said before, I have way too much good in my life to be allowing anything to make me feel bad.
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