Overwhelmed

In theory, I was going to keep this blog upbeat and professional. It was going to be about only the serious issues I face daily when trying to make my work/life/school balance "work". Well folks, it's gonna get personal because that's pretty much all I can come up with right now.

Tonight I have my first mid-term in over five years and I can't remember the last time I studied this hard. And it's an ESSAY exam - I rock those. Between being in study groups with the overachievers (basically everyone in an MBA program is an overachiever - that's how they got there), and being totally freaked out over an actual graded exam, I've been going a little mad. Add to that another midterm on Tuesday for my actual "hard" class - Quantitative Methods - and my inability to hang out with my friends (again, I'm too busy studying!). Even work has picked up because someone around here realized I was smart and needed a challenge to excel - imagine!

As they say, it's all well and good until it's well....not. Due to some shall we say "surprises" in the friend/boy department piled on top of everything else, I was definitely struggling to balance all those balls in the air. My friends, those balls came a-dropping down yesterday morning and I had to take a day off work. Ideally, I would have used that time to study, do laundry, go grocery shopping, pick up my dry-cleaning, wash my car, Swiffer the living room or organize my sweaters... but instead I laid in bed until noon, cried my way into the bathroom to take a shower sometime in the afternoon, and made it to my study group around dinnertime, all the while berating myself because I couldn't keep it together.

Not that I feel a ton better today, because I most certainly do not, but I feel better that nobody cared that I took a day off to just take care of myself, even though I wasn’t “sick”. Lord knows that I wouldn’t exactly have been a stellar employee, and probably an even worse student, if I didn’t give myself the time to get it together.

So maybe there was a message to this story. When you’re in the midst of midterms, you find out a good friend of yours slept with your man, work is getting too overwhelming, you’re PMSing and you miss your friends, TAKE A DAY OFF WORK.