Real vs. Surreal

I'm scared to death. I've admitted that to more than a few people, but it's never hit me more strongly than it did yesterday. We were at T-16 days, and I took the family up to the school because I could finally get in and check out my room. Though I've been raring and preparing for this month for the last two-plus years, nothing has made this momentous change more real than the visit I had yesterday. I'm excited about the resources I'll have available -- it's all more than I thought I'd have, and I'll talk about that more in the days to come -- but I have a LOT of work to do. And unlike most of the work I've done for the last decade, I don't "know" what the final outcome will look like in my head. Not only do I have a lot of work to do, I have a million things I need to learn before I can do it.

That unsureness about the future, which is such a departure from what I'm used to, is what creates the fear. There's a surreal-ness, if I may create a word, that comes from not knowing. Before yesterday, that surreality was beyond my horizon. Now, it's within sight. And there are so many questions -- I don't suffer from insomnia at all, but I was awake for most of last night
trying to "organize" the questions in my head, and I didn't get them all.

I read an article once that described a study claiming that people of lower self-esteem will tend to use alone-time to practice conversations and situations that they foresee having in their heads. I don't consider myself to have particularly low self-esteem, but I do this, a lot. I'm going to have a 45-minute-each-way commute, and I've been telling people that I'll use that time to do audiobooks or some other self-improvement technique. But I realized last night that I'll be spending the first several drives practicing school. I may as well take the radio out of the dashboard.

It's suddenly very real. And it's only going to get realer. T-15.