Week 7
I started mildly freaking out about how much work I had to do and how impossible it seemed to get it all done by the end of the quarter. I said as much to my faculty sponsor who replied, “Yeah, that’s ’cause you’re trying to do 24 credits’ worth of stuff.” For only 16 credits. Oh, right. Talking helped, and I promised I would only do the minimal amount of homework on my vacation.
Week 8
Kauai. Utter bliss. You know that feeling when you didn’t even realize how much stress you carry around with you every day until you feel it all melt away? Yeah. I felt that by the end of lunch on my first day there. I was brave and had adventures and ate great food and fell in love with the earth all over again. I did my homework for my 4-credit class but didn’t do one drop of work on my ILC, and I felt good about that.
Week 9
Came home still not feeling stressed about all the work left to do. Then I started feeling a little bit of stress about how not stressed-out I was. Brain said, “Hey, this stuff is important! You should be stressing out about it!” Freshly plumeria-scented soul said, “Shhhh.” Eventually I came to the decision that there is no way for me to accomplish everything I said I would when I created this ILC. And that that’s OK, because it turns out I overestimated what I can reasonably get done in ten weeks, and my faculty sponsor assures me I’m not going to lose credit. And it’s not like the work ends when the quarter does. I may not write the academic paper I said I was going to, but I’ll eventually write about it here, because it’s a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot and doing the research was hecka fun. And I may not have gotten through a full start-to-end revision of my draft, but I did a ton of work on it, and I know what I need to keep working on before I start pitching it to agents and editors at the PNWA conference. In summary, I am not Wonder Woman, but I am a wondrous woman.
Beth Anna Cook 