The letter came last week, and I laid it on my desk and stared at it for half an hour before opening it. Not knowing the fate of my application was driving me up a wall, and I’d been nearly in a panic trying to fall asleep the night before sorting through contingency plans and interim options and whether or not I really wanted to get into this program at all, with all the changes and travel and stress a graduate school program in another city will entail. So much for zen. But deep down, I really did want in. So when I finally hefted the envelope, unopened, and determined that there were several sheets of paper inside and not just a single rejection note, I breathed a sigh of relief and slit it open. Offer extended. Acceptance. A weight lifted.
The next day was a flurry of ordering updated transcripts, signing papers, sending deposits. Then silence again for a while. The program starts in February. I finally feel free to move forward with planning my weeks in Alaska, so there is freedom in that, too. In the end, I may end up jamming more pieces together than really do fit perfectly. And I don’t care because despite my sometime-panic that this is a Very Bad Idea, when rationality and logic prevail the path is clear and everyone in my life is telling me to go for it.
Given the panic I was feeling the night before the letter came, I thought having a true trajectory settled on would help settle me down. I’ve found (unsurprisingly, given further reflection) this isn’t the case at all. The days are still long and full not not-much besides playing endless games of fetch with the puppy and watching the clock and wrestling with the guilt of unproductivity. The addition of a statistics course, the last in the series of prerequisites for the program, has added some filler to the empty hours but one (particularly this one) can only do math for so long. So there are still good days and bad ones, full ones and those that stretch into infinity over just hours. And not as much writing as there should be.
But the threat of needing contingency plans is fading like a bad dream, and the path north is coalescing as the days get shorter. More work is seeping through the cracks, housing possibilities turning up, friends to visit on the way, little puzzle pieces sliding into place, edge by edge.
entelechyproject 