Ahhhhh.

Finally the workload has let up a little bit. I still have stuff to do, of course, but we're taking a day at home to be warm and cozy and look after things. The house looks like a wreck, so I'm slowly getting bits tidied up. It is raining. It is cold.* Yuck.

Oldest child's college application process is trundling along, sometimes careening, but forward motion is going on, and that's the goal. Yay, kid!

There's another large project going on, too: college for me. This has been something I have felt awful about for a very long time. I have done some pretty cool things, and by most measures I'm a frighteningly smart person, but I've felt lacking in legitimacy for so much, and confronting and dealing with it has been scary and difficult. I finally feel de-crazied enough to ask questions when I'm unsure; understand that I am not invisible and do not, in fact, sink into the chair; and I make myself get the work done, no matter how hard it is. Maybe especially if it's hard. I finally dealt with getting transcripts of my past work issued so that Harvard can apply the transfer credits. I'm behaving like a sane, functioning person, which is quite something for a weasel, especially one that is crazed.

One of the courses I'm doing right now is a required one for Harvard Extension's program, and the combination of the Required-ness and it being a writing course (imagine! me, needing to take a writing course! good grief!) and allegedly difficult to do well in, on top of coming to terms with my past and some truly horrendous periods in my life--well, it's made that writing seminar a little bit emotionally loaded. There is nowhere to hide. We have to bring in copies of our work for the whole class (all of 12 people) to critique. It is sometimes terrifying. I notice myself trailing off at the end of sentences when I speak. I feel uncertain when I write. In summer, I learned that I don't suck at what I want most passionately to do; right now, I'm learning--slowly, painfully--that I just might have the stamina to really do this.

There's a video on the Extension website, where one of the deans talks about the program, and it almost made me cry: it doesn't matter what happened before; we will judge you based on what you do HERE; we want to see what you can do NOW. Well, damn, I can kick ass NOW. How hard can it be, anyway? Not as hard as some other things I've done this year. Bring it on.

So on it comes. I got some more graded work back: continuing to do very well in comparative ethics, at last have a grade and am indeed doing very well in the writing seminar, and - yay! - I did better than I thought on the ghastly bio midterm. This is going to be okay. Finally, it's all going to be okay.**


*It has just stopped raining. It looks beautiful out now.
**Note to Universe: This does not mean that it is now time for something horrible to happen. Just to be clear.