Please forgive my lack of Internet presence over the last couple of weeks. I have been on a self-imposed hiatus from the Internet, for several reasons. For starters, I have been sick as a dog. And when I haven’t been sick, someone else in my family has been. It makes for a lack of motivation to do much of anything. Also, I have to admit, I needed a break from social media. It gets so overwhelming at times, with so much going on and so much of it RIGHT IN YOUR FACE!!!!! Sometimes it’s good to just take a step back and relax for a while.

It also helps put things into perspective. When one is too sick and tired (and tired of being sick and tired), it makes you realize your priorities, particularly for someone like me, who likes to try and take on more than they should. As I look over the past few months, I’m really surprised it’s taken me this long to get sick. By rights, I should have fallen apart much sooner.

So it is with a sad (but confident) heart that I announce that I am officially leaving grad school. As much as I would like to continue, it is too much. There are several reasons, one of the main ones being finances. Due to some issues with financial aid, part of my tuition will no longer be covered by loans. I was forced to try and come up with several thousand dollars in order to cover things, plus still face the fact that I would still come out of this drowning in student loan debt. Put that together with the fact that my job prospects would be tenuous at best (my goal was to become a professor at a college or university – not always a sure bet), and it looked like a whole lot of money and effort thrown into something that wouldn’t pay out much in the end.

And that isn’t even taking consideration of the amount of stress I was putting myself under. I have always enjoyed school, always enjoyed learning. And right now, I wasn’t. It felt silly to devote so much time to something that made me feel nothing but anxious and lacking in every respect. The joy that I usually felt while learning new things was missing, which isn’t the best situation to be in when one is trying to complete a Happiness Project!

In the end, I decided to focus more on the things that bring me more fulfillment: this blog, the podcast, and my novel, which has taken a huge backseat. I haven’t been able to do hardly anything on it for months. And of course, I need to get back to the most important thing – spending time with my family. They have been nothing but supportive and patient through all of this, and they deserve more of my attention, more than anything else that I am doing.

So that’s it. It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day. And I’m feelin’ good.

Categories: Drabbles