Life After Prelims

So I passed. Cue great rejoicing. Although really, all I felt at the time was this distant, unreal sense that it was over and that no one would make me do it again. But I'm thawing out and waking up now, in part simply due to the passage of time but also through my slow reintegration into the world of the living. Here's a brief look at some of the things I've done since Wednesday afternoon that I probably could not have done before:

* Had friends over to hang out and drink wine.
* Put in contact lenses to teach. (My students were adorably/annoyingly confused by this change - "can you just like, not see, or are you wearing contacts?")
* Happy hour and last-minute dinner with fellow comp/rhet-ers
* Spoken to my immediate family on the phone 5+ times.
* Spent the night somewhere other than my own apartment.
* Made an extensive set of playlists for things like Singing Along, Rediscovering Classics, and Rocking Out.
* Cleaning. Hours of cleaning. Totally overhauled my room and brought the bathroom back from the brink of alarming. Words cannot express the catharsis.
* Had a major singalong while doing aforementioned cleaning.
* Began constructing a list of my favorite Community episodes. (Harder than one might think!)
* Big celebratory dinner out with friends and drinks and delightfulness

And that's not even touching all the things I did in the two weeks between passing in and the defense that I could not have done before finishing the essays. It's been a really...expansive few weeks. I'm reclaiming my life, my time, my priorities, and it's still unclear how they'll be redistributed. But I'm not to worried. I am so much more alert to what and who is around me, so much more able to reach in and put a hand on the core of myself...I don't know. I can't quite explain it. It's like before, I couldn't contextualize anything that happened to me in the personal realm with any depth or accuracy. I had truisms and gut reactions, but that was about it. And now I once again have intuition, hindsight, educated speculation, and confidence with which to assess events.

Confidence. God, I've missed you. Confidence isn't even the right word exactly. It's...the sense of myself. The knowledge I've built over 27+ years of who I am and what I can (and can't) do. What I'll always be and what could change over time. It's similar to what I felt on my road trip summer of 2010, just in a lower-key and less dramatically exciting vein - that slow realization that everything I was before is still there if I reach for it. I can't head off on a major adventure now like I did then, sadly - but it seems like I'll find other ways to accomplish the same kind of breaking with status quo that may be just as effective. Things to collide with that highlight the rest of me, the parts that have been in cold storage for the past 5 months. I love new people and new situations. I am energized by the right kind of challenge to my non-academic abiities. I am not as uptight and old and inexorably set on the path to traditional middle-class academic life as I might sometimes feel or fear.

I'm still the same as I've always been. If anything I'm better - just out of practice. I can have what I want. I can surprise myself. I can be the friend/daughter/sister/niece I want to be. And I can win battles no one's even expecting me to fight in.

But bottom line: I'm alive again. And it's going to be awesome.