Statistics.

I totally did it! Yay! Hooray for graduation! It was awesome.

Several things happened that altered the course of my week. We'll have to back up a bit to explain them.

Monday the vomiting continued. I picked up a stronger anti-vomit medicine, and while it definitely helped slow the rate at which I was throwing up, it did nothing for the continually mounting anxiety that was the root of the problem. I can not describe how tightly all my organs were balled up, or how terribly painful and nauseating it was, except by pointing out that my iron stomach pills, even the new stronger ones, failed to stem the flow of bile fromst my lips.

I stumbled through the first half of my shift, teetering at near-panic attack anxiety levels, but managed to hold it together. The whole time I just kept thinking, you could just not take this test and all of this anxiety will go away. It would have too. It really would have solved all my current issues for me, it would have created new ones, but I would have felt better at least.

It's hard to explain the brain-body disconnect I struggle with on issues like these. My brain gets it, it's calm and mostly logical, it knows what's up and it tries to tell me that everything is fine and I need to chill the f**k out. The rest of me however, is unable to listen. I have the most physiologically intense flight or flight response imaginable. All my hormones, neurotransmitters, and organs are screaming:

RUN!!! WHY ARE YOU HERE!?! THIS IS YOUR WORST CASE SCENARIO, NOTHING IS WORSE THAN THIS!! RUN! ALL THE BAD THINGS IN THE WORLD ARE THIS WAY! LETTING YOUR MOTHER PEEL ALL THE SKIN OFF YOUR BODY AND THEN EAT IT WHILE YOU'RE ALIVE AND LISTENING TO HER RELIGIOUS RANTING ON A CONTINUOUS LOOP THROUGH THE ENTIRE PROCESS IS A BETTER OPTION! LETS GO DO THAT! OKAY?! COME ON! LETS GO! WE HAVE TO GO! N O W !!!!!!

Its awful. And resisting it is soooooo hard. Those chemicals are designed to make you run, and dear gods, did I ever want to run away. I cried softly most of the morning when nobody was looking. I continued not to eat anything for fear of making the vomiting worse, and at 9am, I stumbled off to school.

My statistics final was not something I was looking forward to. I dislike statistics. It's not that it's particularly hard, I mean, I passed dif eq., so in theory this isn't really a big deal. It's just that I don't care. Not at all. Not even a little bit. I don't know if you've ever seen me try to learn something I don't care about, but it's pretty funny. I mostly come up with a lot of reasons why I need to avoid it. Then I turn nothing in for at least two thirds of the class in protest, then I realize that I really do need to actually learn enough to pass the final, panic, and try to cram the whole semester into the last 3 or 4 weeks of class. True to form, that's how this class went. At any rate, I was, as always, vastly under prepared for the final. I showed up sans note sheets, as making them would have required effort me to stop panicking and do something, which was clearly never going to happen.

I sat down at my desk and immediately calmed the f**k down. I was past the point of no return. I'd already shown up and had not been flensed, the world had not ended, and it was exactly what my brain had been telling me it was, just a test. I set about making my two allotted cheat sheets. I only completed about a half a page before the test had to start, so that was less than ideal.

The test itself WAS actually my worst case scenario, as I quite literally forgot how to do anything resembling statistics the moment it was handed to me. I couldn't make sense of my cheat sheet, the batteries in my calculator died, and I was left to my own devices. Namely, guessing. Thank the gods for multiple choice exams. Anyway, I finished in record time, due mostly to the fact that I was just merrily guessing away at anything that looked like it might have resembled the right answer. I turned my exam in and hopped back on my bike.

At that point, I realized guessing might have been a bad plan, as I sort of need to pass that class to graduate. The panic set back in. I called my dad to tell him it went terrible, end of the world terrible, and to demand that he confirm that he will love me anyway. He complied, albeit begrudgingly, as he does not understand my rather intense need to prepare for the worst case scenario.

I returned to work, finished my shift and headed home to work on my poster.