It's strange to wake up on a day when something significant was supposed to happen and now isn't.  On Sunday I woke up thinking, "I should be getting back to Oxford," but I didn't, because I don't live in Oxford anymore.  Today I woke up thinking, "I should be going to some class," but I didn't, because I don't go to school anymore.  Instead I holed up reading old books and trying to convince myself that I made the right decision.

I did, of course.  There was hardly another option.

There are a couple things that bother my about what I've done, though.  The first is that I've never really quit something before.  It's always been my way to just hunker down and plow through any and every ordeal, regardless of what good would come of it or its affect on my physical and mental health.  This time, though, things got worse than I can ever remember, so I had to put a stop to it.

The other bother is how I left things, which is quickly and with little to no explanation.  My own parents didn't know what was happening until about a week before I left, and almost no one else heard about it until after Christmas.  There are still a lot of people that don't know who should.  The whole process of dropping out, moving out, and cancelling all my internet/cable/etc. was carried out within three or four days, and it's been hard to do much else since.

As for how it got like this, there are a number of theories.  It's been over a year since I dropped my meds and decided to navigate things on my own, and maybe that game of Russian roulette has come to its inevitable conclusion.  Maybe the weight of doing something I didn't really love as much as I thought I did was just too much, or maybe I just burned myself out.  After all, the past few years have been wirlwindish to say the least, particularly this past one.

I crammed a B.A. double-major into three years, and I spent that last year studying abroad, followed immediately by thesis-writing and grad school applications.  After I graduated I had two months to get myself together and move from Naperville to Oxford, which left almost no time to decompress.  Once I got there I found it hard to do just about anything, let alone my work, so maybe what's going on right is just the breakdown of a car with no more gas.

Either way, what matters is that I'm done.  It's weird to be done.  Like I said, I've been waking up thinking about what I would be doing if I'd kept on.  I'm also very worried about what I'm going to do now.  Up until this point my plans have all been short-term and education-centered: I'll go to high school for four years, now I'll go to college for four years, no, make that three, and now I'll go to grad school for two years...  Not anymore.  Now I actually have to try and figure something out.