My First Semester (according to Frozen)

Hi!!! Hi hi hi! It's been such a very long time since I was on here, and my first semester of graduate school is in the books. So many of you prayed for me, thought about me, and left me encouraging comments over the course of those first 16 weeks; and I want to genuinely thank you - without your love and support, and the support of my family and friends, I genuinely do not know if I would have made it through this semester.

Because you were so kind as to care about what I was going through during this fall and early winter, I wanted to catch you up on a few of the things that happened while I was gone ... I started pouring out my tale of woe and wonder via a traditional post earlier today, but it just got wayyy too long. So, I had the brilliant inspiration to copy imitate the lovely Katherine Sophia and tell you the story of my semester in GIFs. Frozen GIFs, to be precise.

Here's the sneak preview:

***

The first week, everything was miraculous. It was so exciting to be cracking open gigantic textbooks about neuroanatomy, psychoacoustics, and clinical practice - to watch crowds of undergraduate students melt in my path and to have professors talk to me like a real adult. I was a little nervous about moving from the comfort of a full-time job back into the weekly changeableness and stress of classes again, but I loved grad school and I loved being a graduate student.

I think this slightly manufactured delight at my ascension to the halls of academia lasted about two weeks. Two weeks into the semester, things were getting harder and the outside world was seeming farther away than before. I started wanting to escape. 

But everyone else around me seemed happy, so I pushed aside those thoughts and settled in to focus and dedicate myself to my studies.

Except for a niggling feeling of impending doom or future imprisonment in the back of my head, everything was great after that, and I felt really good about life and study and clinic. My classmates and I got along well, I became very attached to my major professor, and my first graded assignments appeared promising. I was feeling optimistic.

Then I saw my neuroanatomy midterm and knew I was in a really, really bad pickle. 

Long story short (and as previously recounted), I failed it. I was the only one in my class. My professor didn't even put a number grade on it - he just basically said "sorry, I got nothing". I have never experienced panic and despair like that in my life. 

My classmates and me when we saw our grades (I'm Elsa).

Two weeks of self-loathing followed. Have you ever experienced that sad, concerned look in a parental figure's eyes when they are terribly disappointed in you and they ask "what happened?" That was the face my professor made when I came to his office after the test. Stricken. Horrified. Worried.

I studied a lot and re-took the test. This time I got a C-. I said "Meh, okay" and moved on after that.

For a while, things were better. I had a painful pep talk with my advisor who helped me analyze what had gone wrong, and helped me develop study plans to be better prepared for the next round of exams. I started realizing that I needed to study hard and really narrow down my focus if I wanted to be successful in grad school; so I did. I quit leaving my building. I slept less and ate less, and read more, wrote more, listened harder, and learned how to really study. I got to know my classmates better and started spending time with them, talking about lessons and assignments as well as learning about how they approached life and school. I thought that the low point was past and things were looking up.

But in fact, I hadn't hit the lowest point yet at all.

They say "bad news comes in threes"; and the lowest point of my semester was the day when a good friend of mine texted in desperation because of some devastating medical news she had just received, and less than 20 minutes later, my professor emailed to let me know that I had miserably failed another assignment and I needed to come meet with multiple professors to try to find the critical flaw in my thinking and study processes. Because of spending my evening counseling and looking up resources for my friend, I turned in my next day's assignment several hours late, and got an email back noting that lateness was becoming a habit with me and she was concerned about my time management skills.

If you Google the symptoms of a nervous breakdown, that was me - feeling detached from reality, emotional numbness, anxiety, obsessive thinking, debilitating fatigue. I went through the motions, even celebrated my birthday at my favorite restaurant with my classmates, and no one knew how close I was to completely losing it. But I was very close. After that horrible meeting with the director of the graduate program and the director of the university clinic, I barely made it back into the lab before collapsing and sobbing harder and more painfully than I had in a very long time.

God brought me healing that weekend by reminding me that it wasn't my grades that made me special to Him - my poor study habits, my difficulty asking for help, my ineptitude for neuroanatomy - all of these fell under the "any other creature" item in the list of things that do NOT come between me and His love. Nothing good about me makes Him love me more, and none of my flaws or sin-struggles make me any less dear to His heart. He loves me because I am His, because I have thrown myself into His arms and trusted Him to rescue me from sin. 

The massive weight of failure and inadequacy rolled off my shoulders. Nervous breakdown avoided.

My grades gradually improved over the next couple of weeks and plateaued at a "not great but borderline acceptable" level. Finals week was the first time I spent 6, 7, and 8 hours at a time doing nothing but studying. I shut out the world, sleep, and food as I wrote final papers and aggressively attacked exams. I've never devoted my whole self to my schoolwork for such a long time before, and I have to say, I'm pretty excited to know that I can do it.

And then, suddenly, they were done.

I had survived.

And now I look like this:

And this:

***

So now it's break, and now the self-evaluation, taking stock, planning ahead, and trying to get rid of my lingering eye twitch begins. There's a lot going on in my head right now ... do I even fit in this field? Am I made for something easier / more artistic? Or do I need to practice more discipline and self-denial and focus on bracing myself for the next semester?

Because as well, in between spells of planning my future, I'm also going to relax and refresh my mind, heart, and spirit so that I'm ready for whatever comes next.

Because whatever it is ... is probably going to look a lot like  ^  that.

***

And I will post about my family's Christmas festivities very soon! I hope you had a wonderful, blessed, joyful Christmas, dear friends!

Lots of love,

Vicki