It's been quite a while.
Since last April, I went to a private acupuncture college for eight months beginning in September. What a disaster. The school was a joke, a calamity, and a byword all rolled into one. So I quit a couple days ago, and have submitted my application for the acupuncture program at the local(ish) university. I'll go part-time, take this at a more leisurely pace.
It's all learning. I learned a lot about Chinese medicine, but I learned a lot more about myself and my family. Yes, I can do it. No, I don't want to do it like that. There are things I wish I could expect, but can't. Just ain't gonna happen. No one's advice trumps my own misgivings. Ever, ever, ever. I'm not mentally deficient. I can keep up with the "big kids", rather nicely.
That last one was a big one for me. One of the gifts of my upbringing was that I should never believe my own eyes or ears, that what I heard said, or saw done, never happened. Which leaves a person in a peculiar position. It's taken me a long time to learn to trust myself, and act on that trust. By the time I was in my teens I was convinced that I must be mentally handicapped, and that there was a conspiracy of kindness wrapped around me to keep me from having to realize it. Seriously. I thought all my teachers were just being "nice" to me, marking me up on assignments just to pass me through without having to deal with my disability. Yes, that was weird. And yes, on the other hand the facts just weren't measuring up. But it makes sense, when you know what was happening in the background, which I don't really want to go into.
Anyway, here I am a looong time later, and I took the plunge. I jumped into post-secondary education, nearly puking with fear of failure and confirmation of the fact that I'm not up to snuff. And I Did Just Fine. Better than that, even.
I recently sat in a classroom alongside an RN, and across from someone with a four-year university science program behind her, and when the instructor introduced the theory of Spontaneous Generation and asked each class member individually whether or not they thought it was true, no one knew. Nobody knew. No idea. Except me. This isn't a sign of genius, but I think it's definitely a sign that you can get through a lot of "higher education" and come out the other side without overly energetic reasoning skills.
So here I am, with a suddenly-free summer ahead of me when I thought I'd be trapped in school, and looking at all the possibilities. I'm going to plant things. Sew things. Paint walls. Do an English correspondence course so I don't have to do it later when I'm busy with studying other things. And keeping up with the acupoints, so when I come back to them later it'll be like a hot knife through butter.
And I'm very, very glad of it all. Today life looks beautiful.
