A hello and then some

Well.

So its been awhile and everyone who ever looked at this space has surely stopped checking it by now. But what can I do about that? It has not been a good year for me. As of the time of this posting, I am a 22-year-old college graduate with a BS in mathematics and absolutely no idea what to do with it.

The problems started in the fall. I shouldn't have taken 17 hours but I was wanting to graduate and then I... well. I had only one class within my major and I didn't do so hot in it. We'll leave it at that. So that was kind of nerve-wracking. In order to graduate I still needed 21 hours, so spring semester was quite possibly the worst four months of my life. It started out alright, of course. I was taking three math courses so I felt pretty good about it, like I was finally going to get to do something I enjoyed.

Well, I don't know.

I started out kind of rough in one of the classes...but that was alright and I recovered and was doing okay for awhile. But then I got sick for about a week and a half, and I lost track of it sometime in early March I think. Suddenly I started dropping behind, and I wasn't sleeping, even more so than usual... it's not that I wasn't tired but there simply wasn't time for it... I started skipping meals without realizing it, or skipping lunch because it meant I could take a twenty minute nap in the middle of the day. It went on like this and then after a couple of weeks things really turned to shit.

The last three weeks were awful. So awful. Anytime I was asked about my plans for after graduation it would be all I could do not to burst into tears, because everything I had ever wanted and worked for suddenly loomed in front of me and I did not want it, not anymore, not at all. Everything I had ever loved about math and logic and rigor had bled from my psyche; it wasn't fun anymore, it wasn't rewarding anymore-- it was just exhausting and frustrating and depressing and so terrible, just so terrible. It was a physical pain to go to class and sit and be bewildered for an hour... and though I know I was about on the same level as everyone else it just felt like I was completely inadequate at anything and everything... I would second guess myself on the homework; skip problems, turn nothing in... Every day was an exercise in misery, in personal failure, in incomprehensible dread... I hadn't heard back from the two grad schools I had applied to, and I finally got the nerve to talk to Wake Forest about my application they told me they had never received the majority of my information.

My immediate reaction to this news was probably not the sanest five minutes of my life. I settled down eventually and it's a good thing too, because when the initial shock wore off what I felt was, surprisingly, a sick, knee-weakening sense of relief.
Suddenly the doors opened, and I realized: I don't have to go to grad school. I emailed App State and told them I had decided not to go in the fall. My application was still partially incomplete anyway.

I don't know, it's been a hard run for me these last few months. I didn't think I would make it. I still don't know how I did. I think my professors were too nice to me; I don't think I deserved it. But someone did, apparently. I survived. And I graduated with a B average, which is completely mysterious to me.

I've always felt that my output at school was never a complete representation of my abilities and I still feel that... It is more a representation of the potential I've always let fall through the cracks due to my recurrent insomnia, general anxiety, and even basic apathy, sometimes. I'll admit, there were times that last semester when faced with completing in my first set of homework in over a week or sleeping for three hours, I'd choose the sleep. When it comes down to it I was really rather a terrible student: problems with attendance, general laziness, the usual half-assery... For me its always been easy to do the bare minimum and still make pretty decent grades-- and I don't think I've ever grown out of that. And that combined with the serious overload I had my senior year.... well... A more dedicated student could have pulled it off. But not me. Toward the end there I got seriously, dangerously depressed-- and I'm lucky that all it made me do was sleep badly and never eat and cry a lot.

In the end, I think I just got overwhelmed... and I think with the opportunity to miss it I'll eventually go back-- I'm sure that if I give myself some time to do something else, maybe to pursue a new line of interest -- I'm absolutely sure that I will miss it dearly. That sort of method of thought is kind of buried inside me, a constant hunger, a longing running through my blood; I know I will miss it, I know I will want to go back.

But right now I have to concentrate on regaining the will to live.