How it came to be…

I don’t know if I’ve honestly shared where the term “Nutcase 101″ came from with you, my lovely readers. My bio use to state a blurb about “after twenty-six years, many degrees and hundreds of hours of classes” but there was an actual moment where I felt like I couldn’t handle my scholastic career, I felt like I was going batshit crazy. This is that story and the inspiration for Nutcase 101.

The time on my bedside clocked glowed 4:30 and no light filtered in the window, there was no moon that night.

This was a common practice for me to be wide awake when most of the world was slumbering because I was in the second year of my double masters program and twenty-four hours a day was no where near the amount of time that I needed to get all of my work done. Since the start of August, I had been tasked with going to class, studying, go to work, running a project team of undergrads, organize and implement a recruitment campaign for my program, try to find a job and sleep (plus all of the other things that we have do to stay alive and maintain some sort of acceptable hygiene).

Sleep was the luxury that I gave up first.

There was too much to get done and I had to make sure everything was a success because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t get the grades and if I didn’t get the grades I wouldn’t get the job and if I didn’t get the job, then twenty-six years of hard work would be for nothing.

That is the thought that would run through my head every moment that I wasn’t concentrating at the task at hand. So, anytime I tried to lay down I was thinking of the what had to be completed and that I just completed or that if I dared to play hokey, that I would be so far behind my whole life would come tumbling down.

Any slumber I did get was fretful and full of images of falling in endless pits. Being awake was so much better because I thought I had some sort of control.

But on this particular morning, the synapses in my brain were firing rapidly reminding me of a giant list of tasks and deadlines that needed to be completed and met. And that’s when I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I tried studying. Sobbing. Watching TV. Sobbing. I couldn’t call anyone to share my mental state because it was so early. My mind might have been broken but my manners were still in tact. The nausea started, my chest tightened, shaking from head-to-toe, dizzy spells and a number of other symptoms of being in a state of panic.

Then I got the brilliant idea that I needed to get to campus and camp out in front of my adviser’s office door, so that when he arrived at work at 7 am he could deal with a woman in full blown mental break-down and panic attack before his first cup of coffee. I wanted to quit everything – school, life because I couldn’t handle the responsibility.

I don’t remember the drive to the campus but I do remember entering the business school building (24 hour access) and feeling a sense of relief of being on campus. But that did not last long as the panic became a hundred times worse as I realized that by leaving the graduate program that I would be letting everyone down, that my parents would be ashamed and I was going to be labeled a quitter and a failure.

And honestly, after that point, I don’t remember the thoughts that went through my head or what I did until 7 am when my professor walked around the corner and saw me there. I just know that my professor found me outside of his office curled up in a ball and he patiently spoke to me for several hours until my panic attack was over. He let me babble incoherently and took the time to listen to my fears. All of them.

He assured me of my abilities, confirmed that I was overworked and that I would be fine. That life would be okay.

And he was right.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Friends, Pleas of Desperation, The unknown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.