Documenting my journey through the mental health system

Have I bit off more than I can chew? Honestly…probably.

I’m working two jobs. I run a rental property. I’m trying to take care of and slowly restore a house. I support my mother. And my manic ass applied to grad school when I got out of the hospital and I got accepted.

I start July 7. I’ve never done online school, I have no idea what that is like. I have no idea what I am doing. I was successful in signing up for a Canvas account and Eagle ID – the Eagles are the school’s mascot. This is just a small university in a small town 20 minutes from Spokane. I attended for my undergrad and had a good experience, graduated cum laude. My first attempt at a masters there did not go well. It was in person, it was the wrong program for me, I also went through a severe and life threatening mental health crisis that saw me detained and locked up for a couple weeks. I talked about all this before, and how in the end I was never able to go back and had to essentially put my life all back together again. I changed jobs, moved, all of it. Later bought my house. That was a long recovery.

I never thought I’d try to go back to grad school in any form. This is a public health program, it will involve a lot of writing, reading, analysis, probably some statistics. These are all easy to me. When I saw the ad for the program it spoke to me. Hard and loud. I can finish in 16 months, pay as I go, and I never have to step foot in an actual classroom.

Dr B would say to remember what I learned from the last time. Time has a way of deadening the effect of old wounds and scars though. I was cutthroat, brutal in my approach, and now I have to be more realistic. I don’t know what this is going to look like, I can’t compare it to the time before. That was a straight up nightmare. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared as shit. What if I set myself up like the last time? Lofty goals and expectations and an extremely competitive nature that saw me crash and burn was so hard when I couldn’t live up to my own impossible standards so I almost died. I’m not saying that exact thing is going to happen if things don’t work out but I really don’t want things to not work out! I don’t know what good the degree is to me, I don’t know yet what I will do with it, I just want it. I felt very drawn to it and have been working in healthcare for years and years already. Maybe I will still just be a CNA after that, but I spent a lot of time in a lot of therapy trying to be accepting of things as they are, to tone down absurd expectations, and be more patient.

Time is marching rapidly to an escalating beat only I can hear.