Certainty and Anxiety

School has started and brought with it those mixed emotions of excitement and anxiety.  I really love my courses so far; I can't explain it, really, but I think they will alter the way I perceive the world.  They are showing me new sides to things I thought I knew something about, fundamental things.  One of them, surprisingly, is more of a poetry class than anything, and as I haven't taken a course that focuses on any type of poetry since junior year of undergrad, I'm pretty excited.  The professors seem really wonderful, too, in that way that gets you pumped up about learning after just the first day.

But of course, being me, I manage to get overly anxious and to set myself impossible tasks before I've even started.  I have butterflies in my stomach and my breathe comes too fast.  I had forgotten what this kind of panic feels like.  It's been so long since I've woken up gasping for air, certain I've forgotten to do something or certain that I won't be able to finish everything I need to accomplish.  I will be able to accomplish it, of course I will, but the anxiety creeps in all the same.

I'm holding on to a feeling I had last week.  The day after orientation the second year students organized a scavenger hunt for the first year students.  We looked for things across campus, down M Street and in Dupont Circle, and took pictures of them.  We had to find things like the chapel on campus, someone in a Georgetown shirt or hoodie, at the canal, at the place that sells Chicken Madness.  We had to take a picture of us using public transportation, eating a cupcake, in Kramerbooks, and one of all of us jumping once we'd completed the scavenger hunt.  It was a really wonderful day.  It might have earned the distinction of my best day in D.C.  I walked across Key Bridge back into Virginia as the sun was setting.  The sky filled with pink and blue and yellow, and in the river below people kayaked and paddle-surfed, and the breeze blew cool across the bridge.  I had this feeling that everything was as it should be.  I experienced a kind of certainty about where I am and what I'm doing, and this overwhelming joy that I'm here.  And it's the certainty and joy that make it all-- even the anxiety-- worthwhile.

 (English grad student scavenger hunt!)