Thought Process

I've been having anxiety dreams lately, almost every night this week. I don't always remember them when I wake up. The bits I remember usually have to do with screwing things up at the restaurant (forgetting about a table completely, moving like I'm stuck in molasses even when I know I need to be moving quickly) or my usual variety of anxiety dream where I'm packing frantically then end up missing my plane anyway or, if I do manage to make the plane, the plane crashes. I wake up feeling uneasy and sometimes I can't shake the feeling for an hour or more, and I hate it.

You'd think that I'd be really relaxed right now. My thesis is up at the library being bound, so it's finally completely and utterly finished. My box office job is finished forever as well. I have nothing important to do until next month. And maybe that's part of my problem. With nothing concrete to focus on, my brain goes into overdrive. I realize that in a lot of ways I am suited to life as an academic because I spend so much time Figuring Things Out. My mind just never relaxes and turns off, even when I really need it to. This is both a blessing and a curse, but after almost 25 years I know that this is just the way I'm wired, and so I deal with myself and most of the time I focus on the blessing part of it much more than the curse part.
I spend a very large portion of my life trying to figure out why I feel the way I do about things, and how other people are feeling and why. Apparently I have always been like this. My mom said when I was a toddler I used to follow her around the house asking incessantly, "Are you happy or sad? Are you mad or glad?" I'm pretty certain I was just practicing my Sesame Street feelings words, but at the same time those were probably legitimate questions since I do the exact same thing now. Given, now that I'm an adult I mostly keep these thoughts to myself. I'm constantly gauging people's emotions, trying to figure out if they're happy or sad, mad or glad, and why I think they might be feeling that way. The upside to this is that I feel like I'm pretty good at figuring out why people are behaving in a particular way (assuming their behavior is at least in some way based on logic, which in the case of people with some mental disorders is obviously not the case). The other good thing about this is that some people seem to really need me to give them blunt assessments of their behavior sometimes, and I like that I feel comfortable being that honest sounding board for certain friends. The bad thing about this is that I make a lot of assumptions about other people based on the constant analysis I'm doing on them in my head. Often I just let these assumptions stand, particularly if I don't know a person well enough to ask them whether or not I'm correct, and that's not a good thing. I think I AM right about people, a lot of the time. But I know my analysis is not correct all the time, and my assumptions can be unfair. The thing is, I don't think most people would react well to my declarations of, "You're behaving this way right now, and I think this is why." This is why I only make statements like that to a few choice people. Because if I'm wrong in my assumptions, that pisses people off. And if I'm right about them, that pisses them off even more because there is nothing more annoying than other people recognizing your flaws, patterns, or emotions before you fully recognize them yourself. Sometimes I like the puzzle of figuring people out. Other times, like tonight, I just wish people would make it easy for me and say, "I'm acting like this, and this is why, and this is how I think it is going to affect you." Wouldn't that be nice?
I should add here that I'm not talking about a particular person or event right now. I just re-read that last paragraph and realized that it sounds like I'm writing a cryptic entry about a specific person and trying to keep it anonymous, but no, I'm not. This is just something I'm thinking about.

The other thing my mind tends to go into overdrive about is my future. You all know that by now, I talk about it a lot. I'm looking forward to my future, and I'm excited about it, but I hate all of the unknowns. I realize that life is full of the unknowns and that is never going to change, and I do the best I can to deal with it and try not to worry too much about things I can't control. But I still think about it all a lot anyway. I realize that most of my anxiety dreams right now are about my upcoming move. I like new things to a certain extent, but I am very much a creature of habit and having everything disorganized and feeling unsettled makes me crazy.* I'm not looking foward to packing up this apartment and leaving here at all, and my mind is already dwelling on that inevitability when I'm asleep at night.
I'm looking forward to being in my new home, don't get me wrong, but I'm not looking forward to the couple of months of transition in between. Although I think I'll be reasonably happy in El Paso for the summer, because I'll be able to make my own temporary routine there.
And frankly, even though I'm looking forward to moving to the D.C. area, I'm also extremely nervous. I think I'll feel better once I get there in May and see where I'm going to live and get a vibe on the place because, again, it's the unknown that is worrying me more than anything. Of course, the known is scaring me, too. I read a lot of blogs of Ph.D. candidates and the overall theme seems to be, "This is so hard, and overall job prospects suck." Which of course makes me go, "Why do I want to do this again?" I do realize that people mostly use their blogs as an outlet to bitch about things that are going wrong in their lives, so I know there is a lot of good that I'm just not reading about. I also know that I would never forgive myself if I didn't at least try for the Ph.D. at this point. I may not get there, or I may get there but then realize I hate it. And I know that. But right now I honestly can't envision myself doing anything else. And THAT scares me, because if this next step doesn't work out for me, what else am I going to do with my life?
But then I remind myself that I haven't always been like this. I remember a time when I honestly thought I'd be a high school teacher and I thought I'd be content doing that for life. I also remember a time, not even that long ago, where I thought--and realize that I am cringing as I'm writing this and I can barely admit it, even to myself--that since I liked school so much I might as well keep going to get my MA, and that probably by the time I was done with my MA I'd be in a serious relationship and ready to get married and then have a baby or two so I wouldn't really use my degree and I'd just adjunct teach or do something like that for a while before taking years off to take care of my kids. Yes! At 20 I really thought I was going to be able to plan my life neatly like that! And I thought that was what I wanted!
And now my mindset has changed drastically. For one thing, I didn't end up with that serious relationship I thought I'd find for sure (FOR SURE!) by the time I was 22. Ha. Hahahahahahaha. I also realized that I really do like research, I really do love what I'm studying, and that there is at least a small possibility that I might actually have some talent at what I do. Over the past two years, the idea of going on to the Ph.D. has become very important to me. The idea of getting my name and my research out there and adding my voice to the body of work has become an important dream that I am not about to give up on yet. I was positive that I would want to be a stay-at-home mother one of these days, but now I feel like if I ever actually get to the point where I have a Ph.D. and a teaching job I am not going to want to give that up. And I never thought I would choose a job over a family, but suddenly that choice is much, much harder to make, whereas before I would have gone, "Family!" in an instant.
I still think that if and when I do have the opportunity to make my own family one of these days, I'm probably going to choose to embrace that opportunity fully. But in the absence of a concrete way to attempt to achieve that dream, I have really latched onto this dream of the Ph.D. and a tenure-track job since at least this is a dream that I can actually work toward.
Still, when I think too much about it, it scares me. I'm afraid that I'll become so solitary doing my Ph.D. work that I'll emerge from it 30 years old and still as single as I am right now. And how much does any of what I'm doing right now even matter if I'm only doing it for myself? I can tell myself day in and day out that it's okay to want to do it just for me, that it's wonderful to have the opportunity to be as selfish as I want and work towards my goals without having to worry about other people, but even though a serious relationship would add so many more things to worry about, I also know that I want those worries eventually. I do want a partner in this life one of these days. The flip side of that coin is that I worry that I'll meet someone I love, give up the dream I'm chasing right now to be with that person, and then regret it later. Everyone seems to think that it's great that I can start a Ph.D. program while I'm free and single with all the time in the world to devote to my research, and to a certain extent I agree. But at least the people that start a Ph.D. program with a husband and family already know what their future holds, more or less. They know the hurdles they have to jump to get to that degree. I have no idea what my hurdles are going to be: who I'm going to fall for at an inappropriate moment, what choice I might end up having to make between a career and a person I care about, and hey, there we go again with the unknowns!
Sometimes I drive myself crazy with this circular, damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't thought process. But I guess the main thing I keep trying to remind myself of right now is this:

You didn't always want to do this. You used to have other dreams. And even though you think those dreams are silly now, they were important to you then and they might become important to you again. Or maybe something else will become important to you. So if this doesn't work out for you, you are a smart girl and there are other things you can do. Also, the odds of you being single forever are pretty slim, and even though it's going to be hard to handle the challenges of being in a relationship when you're so used to being single, you're going to be fine and you're going to work it all out, so chill the fuck out.

On that note, I'm going to bed and hoping that there are no nightmares tonight. Sorry for rambling. Thanks for reading, if you did.

*Footnote: Incidentally, I don't know why I love having a set, known routine and an organized personal space and yet can also love traveling so much since travel is generally nothing but unknowns and shared space (and often messy shared space at that). Maybe it's that I know when I'm traveling to expect those things, and that I still have a home somewhere on the planet where everything is organized just the way I like it? I don't know...