Picking Up The Pace

It’s been a long time since I last updated and so I thought I’d spend some time catching everyone up on what’s been happening and on some of my plans for the future. For the past few months, I’ve been largely bogged down with Accounting and Finance classes that just didn’t leave me with a lot of extra time and energy to work on much of anything else. Even my gaming blog over at www.agirlirl.com has been neglected, though I have been very active on my @agirlirlblog Twitter and have built up a number of great connections with people who are passionate about computer/video games and web and social media technologies.

As the weeks went by though, I became more and more disgruntled that my plans and goals had nearly come to a standstill because I was spending so much time each day in activities that were contributing less and less to these goals.  My attitude went very sour, and I just felt tired all the time.

During January and into February, I went from being tired to just being outright fatigued, and I started getting physically sick nearly every weekend as my immune system would just crash at the end of the work week and I’d then have to struggle with getting all of the Finance homework assignments and quizzes done. I managed to do it though and was getting 100% or close to it on every assignment.

However, it was the Friday before this week  when I determined that something had to give or else I could start developing some serious health issues. I do tend to get a couple of nasty colds in the winter, and then I just take a day or two to sleep them off and I’m fine. My immune system is very strong and I’ve never even had the flu. Stress and fatigue has an interesting effect on things though as I’ve found out.

I was pretty fatigued when I went to sleep that Thursday night and was out cold the moment my head hit the pillow. When I awoke Friday morning, jarred rudely awake by the alarm clock, my whole body was involuntarily shaking with fatigue. Even so, I managed to drag myself off to the job and used every ounce of my nearly non-existent energy that day just trying to keep focused. I had a mid-term coming up the following week and I couldn’t afford to get sick again.

On Saturday, I woke up at about 1pm and was still tired. I was literally unable to study no matter what I tried to do. My brain and body were telling me no, they had finally had enough. That’s it. Enough. Too many months (years) of drudging onwards without any real breaks or vacations had finally worn me down to the point where I knew I had to make a very difficult decision as the situation had become critical.

Mind you, I love school. I am passionate about learning new things and making new discoveries, but I reluctantly decided that I would withdraw from my Finance class and take a break from school until the Fall semester. My hope is that the time that I will get back from not having classes will allow me to resolve the bigger problem that has been steadily draining the joy from my life and creating all of the stress in the first place. Dropping classes would not have been my first choice, but it was the current option that wouldn’t leave me financially in the hole while I got things back on track.

I’ll now have created more opportunity to do a lot more of the web stuff that I really enjoy, and be able to ultimately dump everything else that doesn’t align with this passion.

Special thanks to Stig Nygaard for the use of Zebra under the Creative Commons license.