A Blog Post: Three Short Paragraphs and a Really Long One

I haven't made a proper blog post in ages, and it's 12:12 AM on a Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, so what better time to do it, eh?

Okay. Life's been ridiculous. My life, in general, is a bit ridiculous. At around the middlish-end of August (seven weeks ago, precisely) I started my online courses for this semester. They aren't blatantly difficult, but figuring out just how to handle online classes was initially very, very hard. It still is, really -- hard in the sense that it takes a lot of effort, effort I've only somewhat been used to before now. It's different, definitely. It's challenging in a lot of aspects, probably in a good way, but there has been a lot of struggle involved with it.

I'm currently in the process of transferring from aqua therapy to physical therapy, only because aqua therapy was so far away -- all the way on the north side -- and now that I'm a bit stronger, my mom thinks I would probably benefit more from regular physical therapy. I start it sometime this week.

Then there's my regular, actual therapist. She's been really great, and really, really helpful with certain things I've been struggling with a lot lately. But she's on maternity leave right now, and I won't see her again until November. In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of figuring-out emotionally and mentally for myself. I know there are things that I need to change -- and it's not really about making any progress in my life necessarily, doing something that will revolutionize my way of living, it's just about being happier in general. My happiness depends so much on my attitude and my approach to things; I get way too easily bogged down in the things that I can't change and can't do and can't fix, and I let that completely overwhelm me. Simultaneously, I'm ignoring the things that I can do and can change in favor of focus on the negative. It seems like a really simple thing, but I've been in a rut the past few weeks with several really, really low points, and times during which I felt so terrible that I thought I would never feel better, and life was destined to be like that for me, forever. But there are so many great things in life to think about and dream about, so many things to be inspired by. Not everything's serious and hard and terrible. I was thinking about this earlier -- I am planning every single day of my life in relation to my entire future, when the future is completely a figment of my imagination. I have no idea what my future is like, or how long it'll even last. I'm planning my life around finishing college so I can get a good job so I can live comfortably and be able to retire. And as important as that is, thinking about the long-run, sometimes I completely forget about the short-run--the present. Because, I mean, when you think realistically, the only thing we have is the present. Absolutely nothing else is guaranteed; not next month, not next week, not tomorrow. That's kind of morbid and I mean, the likelihood of a meteor falling out of the sky and landing right on top of you or something is pretty rare, but you never know. And I would hate to think that I would live my life in complete and total stress, constantly planning in an attempt to predict the future, only to die of a heart attack at like thirty-five or something. There are so many people who are taken from the world before their time is up, before they ought to go. It happens all the time, every day, and we never think it will be us, or someone we love, until it happens. That just really hit me today -- out of nowhere, really -- and I just realized that really all I have is right now. I looked over some old blog posts from around this time last year, and I was so happy -- struggling, of course, but overall, in general, I was so happy. And that was so weird to think, and it made me feel terrible about the place I'm in right now. Like I'm a failure for feeling the way I feel. But the significant difference between myself now and then was that I took each day at a time. I didn't analyze the possibilities of the future and completely stress myself out -- I had enough on my plate to worry about on a day-to-day basis. I still do. But since then, I've lost that sense of doing what I need to each day and letting go of the rest. Lately, it just hasn't occurred to me that I have a choice in how I'm feeling, a choice in what I do, how I react to things, and how I approach situations. I'm in control of so much more than I think, but all I seem to care about is what I don't have -- I'm going to fix that. Because if there's something I have control over, I need to take it; I need to make up for all the things I can't. I know what I have and I know what I can do, and that's what's important. Right now and today. Tomorrow, next week, next year -- they matter, of course, but I don't think anything matters as much as what happens right here and right now.