(Please forgive the tossed salad organization of this post.  I have not slept much in the past week…two weeks…month…year…s)

As of Tuesday afternoon at approximately three o’clock, I was done with grad school.  I was done with school.  Forever.  Well, mostly.  I will not actually graduate until December; I have all of my classes done, but I have not completed my thesis yet.  I have a scheduled completion date of 3 August (chosen so that it will be done, theoretically, before my niece is born).  I will then do my thesis defense in autumn.  Still, school is done.  Pardon me while I channel Alice Cooper.

Oh, yes, I absolutely listened to that on my iPod approximately forty times in a row.

Of course, I excitedly exclaimed to a friend how I was done with school forever.  That friend smirked and told me in no uncertain terms that he would bet a particular reproductive organ that I would be back in school eventually.  Talk about a buzz kill.

Now, to say that I am feeling somewhat burned out at this point would seem to me to be a collosal understatement (those in favor of making hypobole a word raise your hand).  If there was an award given for most all-nighters pulled in the course of a year, it would be on my desk.  I’m sure that is partly due to my insomnia, but a lot of it is due to the fact that I work all. the. time.  I was talking to a fellow classmate who is a newly retired Globe reporter, and I told him that I was feeling burned out.  He laughed at me.  I can’t really say I blame him, because I am twenty-two and I stood there talking to a man who was working as a reporter while he attended grad school.  I probably looked more than a little ridiculous.  However, I have been working at my peak levels since approximately my freshman year of high school, and I have gone through undergrad and grad school in four years.  I did what is normally a six-year stint in four.  Truthfully, not all that impressive, but I am tired.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve been running on little to no sleep.  I had a 16-page paper due on Tuesday.  I had a 25-page paper due last week.  I had a project due the week before that, and I had a 15-page paper and a project due the week before that.  I’m a little run down. I tried to take a picture of myself on Tuesday as a celebratory “I’m done!” memento to commemorate the occasion.  I tried to smile.  Really, I did.  However, smiling took a lot of effort, and this was the outcome:

Not a drug user, though this photograph might lead you to believe otherwise.

Sadly, that was the best of all the pictures I took.  That is the one closest resembling a smile.  Yes, that is the picture that I looked the happiest in.  The happy is there, it’s just hidden really, really deeply under all the layers of “Can’t sleep, gonna kill somebody.”

I’m proud of my accomplishments, but I wish I had developed some sense of restraint in my work.  Looking back on my undergraduate and graduate career, I realize just how hard I worked myself.  I never really gave myself a break.  I truly wish I had.  Illness was really the only thing that kept me from proceeding at full speed nonstop, and even then I would attempt to do work when I shouldn’t have.  (I was in the hospital my freshman year with a severely bad case of TSS–and apparently was quite lucky to come out of it–and I was still trying to work on a paper I had due.  The doctor ordered the nurses to move my notebook out of my reach at one point, because I couldn’t walk.  I wish I was joking.)  To say that I was the nerd who spent my Friday and Saturday nights in the library studying and writing papers would not be an understatement.  I had some semblance of a social life, though not much of one–I developed more of one within the past year and a half, truthfully, but even then, it was lacking compared to most college students.  It was the same routine again and again.  Someone would invite me to hang out or go somewhere, and I’d politely decline to stay in and do work instead.  Eventually, people would get the hint and stop.  It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s usually that I’m too tired to, and when I have work to do, I feel guilty about going out.

I am staying in Boston for at least another year.  Those of you who follow me on Twitter probably already know this.  It was a difficult decision to make, certainly, especially given the pending birth of my niece in August, but it is ultimately what I believe is best for me at the moment.  I’ll have access to my professors for conferral on my thesis, and I’ll more access to research facilities.  I will be living with my best friend, and I could not be happier about the situation.  (You can see pictures of the apartment we will be moving into here. This is all left from the previous owner. It is not ours. We do not have a child.) During the summer, I’ll be working part-time for my program while I work on completing my thesis and hopefully acquire a job for autumn.  I am hoping that this will be my Thoreau year where I get to really think and figure things out.  I’m done with school, and the timing is perfect.  I will finally have time for me and time to really think about the past several years.  I am also hoping on working on finally living rather than just existing.  So, here’s to finally saying “yes” rather than “thank you, no.”

On that note, a friend suggested that, in the spirit of evolving, I should now take one day out of the week for myself.  I asked her to clarify what she meant, and she said that I should take a day where I just have fun and relax and do no work whatsoever.  I must admit, the suggestion at least intrigued me.  However, when I realized what she was proposing, I sort of freaked out.  The prospect is intimidating.  A day of no work whatsoever?  It sounds heavenly.  However, then my mind went into overdrive, because I’m used to being pretty good at most things I try my hand at (domestic and athletic arenas aside)–you know, things that can be evaluated.  Having fun?  Actually living?  Being normal?  Relaxing?  To my knowledge, these activities do not have an evaluative scale attached to them, and that positively terrifies me.  How do I know whether or not I’m doing it right?  Admittedly, those are fairly neurotic fears, but I have them nonetheless.  Already people are making suggestions of things I should do on my weekly day off.  It strikes me that maybe I should be annoyed that they feel it necessary to provide suggestions, but I’m not.  Any annoyance I feel is directed towards myself, because I realize that the helpful suggestions really are necessary, and that says a lot that I really don’t want to acknowledge.  However, I have to.  So, if you feel like making suggestions of your own, please feel free to do so.

I cannot believe I am actually done.  My body can’t seem to grasp that yet either.  I keep having difficulty sleeping through the night.  I keep waking up after an hour or two of sleep and jolt out of bed to grab a notebook and turn on my computer, always thinking I have work to be doing and then having to remind myself that, no, I do not have work to do, please go back to sleep.  Except I can’t, because once I realize I don’t have school work I need to be doing, my mind will conjur up at least three other things I could or should be doing instead.  It is probably sad that I can think of work that needs to be done at three o’clock in the morning and see nothing wrong with doing it exactly at that moment.  I am so used to working at all hours of the day that working in the middle of the night on cleaning my room or doing laundry or writing an email does not at all seem unusual or unreasonable.  Clearly, I have a ways to go.  I am very excited about it, though.  I’m done!  Elatedness!