stressball

stress makes me crazy.

i used to believe that i thrived under pressure, that i did my best work when i was down to the wire, that i could crank out any length paper or any amount of studying in a short span of time.

i think that i still would thrive under pressure, if pressure happened one assignment at a time. if this week were ONLY a sermon saved for the last minute, or ONLY a short-notice hebrew exam or ONLY a class presentation whose work time was stunted by thanksgiving, then i'd be doing great right now. i can do anything down to the wire provided that i don't have a hundred other down-to-the-wires lined up. some of this is procrastination. i know. but that's my way of life.

a lot of it is my foolishness in believeing that i could easily be a student, an intern, a wedding planner, and a st. olaf choir concert planner all at the same time. um...it's hard. too much to do.

and so i am paralyzed tonight.

and matt is stressed, too. it's midnight and i'm giving up for the night -- vowing to get up early to finish my sermon and to spend every bit of the 4 hours i can add up between classes working on it (which is, of course, a horrible idea). but matt has a couple hours of work left. and i feel guilty for stranding him, or i feel like he's resenting my resignation, or that he's mad that i'm giving up for the night when i really should be working. i can't explain it, things are just WEIRD at the moment. he's stressed and so he dives into his work and doesn't talk and pulls away. when i crawl into bed and call him, he'll be quiet and distracted, and might end the conversation very quickly to get back to his work. but i'll want him to take care of me. i'll want to be clingy.

and he'll leave and i'll feel abandoned, like his work is more important than i am, and that will make us both more stressed, and then i'll either not be able to sleep or i'll sleep too late to get work done before my first class in the morning, and that will make me more stressed.

it's like making a rubber band ball at a rubber band factory. once you start, it's way too easy to keep going. once we hit stress, we'll feed off of each other and create more stress for each other, and one simple stressful evening will quickly and without much notice turn into a full fledged stressball. not the stressballs that are squishy and theraputic. stressballs that are, literally, human beings driven to a completely stressed state in which stress fizzles and revolves around them like an electron field around the nucleus of an atom.

yikes.

tonight must be REALLY crazy if i'm resorting to particle physics.

i need sleep.