abeburnett

This isn’t easy. Not that I expected it to be. However, it’s revealing a lot of aspects of myself and my psychosis that I haven’t been entirely aware of until now.

See, I’m roughly 25% of the way through the course. Nicely done, you say. Well, thank you. I’ve come to realize that nearly everytime that I finish one section (the course has many subsections: grammar, medical word building, etc.) I get…stuck. It’s like at the end of every section I yank my mind out of gear and then can’t get it shifted back into gear again for weeks, sometimes months. As you can guess, this has made for slow going in the course. Why do I disengage so counterproductively? I think it’s because each section requires me to learn new things in new ways. The presentation of the material changes in order to teach my mind the information in a new way. It’s a good method, but intimidating for me.

It’s like visiting a website every day and each day finding the interface completely changed; colors, link placement, styles, content, everything. Well, that’s not entirely a good example, but it’s close.

There are also psychological aspects to my slow progress (although, in spurts I get LOTS done). I’ve developed a deep fear of failing (humiliation/rejection). Such fears really undermine the educational process-which requires that someone be willing to fail again and again in the course of learning something. I’ve had to conciously work on telling myself that it’s good to fail because it gives me more to learn, and learning is GOOD. I try focusing on just reading and learning the information and making progress on the course (it’s self-paced), rather than aceing every quiz and exercise. People like me have wrongly connected their sense of self-worth to their performance in life. This makes for low self-worth because life-by it’s very nature—is all about failing, being “wrong”, making mistakes.

Anyway, I’m 25% of the way through this course and in order to continue studying after May 2nd I’ll have to shell out $60 for a three month extension. I’d LIKE to finish the current section BEFORE May 2nd so that I’d feel like I CAN indeed finish the rest of the course in the three months. When I complete the section I’m working on I’ll be 40% of the way through. My fear is that next winter will roll around again and I still won’t be done with the course. Technically, if I worked 5-6 hours a day on this course I’d have been done with it MONTHS ago. I feel like there’s some sort of AHA! moment I need to experience in order to overcome the barrier between me and why I don’t do the 5-6 hours a day, even though I have the time.

I acted the role of the bitter, disgruntled, arrogant teacher in Anne of Green Gables. It was so much fun to let loose on those upstart, annoying, worthless pricks their parents called children (just kidding, being in character, yah know?). A LOT of hard work… all the rehearsals and then putting on the production itself: eight sold-out nights in a row (in a theater that sat nearly 700 people).

I DO love myself unconditionally. It is also something I’ll spend the rest of my life keeping in mind… just the fact that I, as a human being, am valuable and priceless. How true it is that we rarely see just how important our own individual lights are to those around us. Only if you never knew anyone in your entire life, and lived and died in a vacuum could you truly say that you didn’t matter to anyone. Even the people I don’t like add richness to my experience of life and I would truly miss them if they were gone.