Last night was my interview for my dream internship. So much is riding on me getting this position. If I get this internship, I’ll get to graduate by next December, meaning we’ll get to move to Kalamazoo so I can start grad school and perhaps most excitingly, start our family. Should I fail to get this position, I’ll have to either wait another year or move (potentially out of state) for a different internship. Which is a lot to take in.
I just wish I knew one way or another. Like Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part.
I talked in a recent post about how I wish I could fast-forward my life story and know for sure that everything works out the way I planned. I’ve been reading books on things like the law of attraction and how you can manifest the life you want just by imagining it really hard. I hope that’s true, but at the same time, I hope it isn’t, because I’m secretly afraid the second I lose faith, everything will come crashing. If my hopes can manifest good things, surely my anxieties will manifest bad things in turn. That’s how it works, right?
And all I can think about is, if I’m this much of a wreck waiting for news on whether or not I got an internship, imagine how much more of a wreck I’ll be waiting for news of whether or not I have some terminal illness or something.
I don’t have a lot of family baggage, but there is one generational curse that’s plagued the women in my family for time immemorial, and that’s anxiety. My grandma was so anxious she rarely ever left the house and consequently never learned to drive. My mom’s better, but not by much. I see how anxious she is and it breaks my heart. She’s scared of heights, bridges, highways, serial killers — she once told me not to date a guy because he looked vaguely like a local murderer who was on the run (it wasn’t him, for what it’s worth). And as much as I’d like to consider myself fearless, I do have things that scare me. One of them is death, and the other is not being able to do everything I want to do before death. So really, I only have one fear, but it’s a whopper.
This internship and the anxiety I’m feeling over it is a microcosm I’m of my bigger fear — that I won’t get to accomplish everything I’ve set out to do. I’m scared if I don’t get this internship, I’ll have to wait another year for it to happen again, and what if I don’t get it then and have to wait another year? What if I can’t have kids by then? What if I’m like, 50 by the time I graduate from grad school? I’ll already be halfway dead, right?
I don’t have an easy antidote for anxiety, and if I did, trust me, I’d sell that shit in a heartbeat and make millions. I guess there’s always Xanax, but you need a prescription for that and that’s too much work. I think the thing that’s helping me is one single affirmation — “What if it all goes right?” We’re so used to telling ourselves it’ll all go wrong, just changing your inner dialogue to something more positive helps alleviate the stress. Will it make the thing you want to happen, happen? Maybe, if you believe in the law of attraction. But it’ll make things easier in the meantime.
I’m holding onto the hope that this internship will come through and I won’t have to uproot my entire life to finish my degree. But if it comes down to it, I know things will work out in the end. God has always provided a way for me in the past, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. There’s always a way forward, even when the waiting is daunting. You just gotta trust that the universe will catch you as you’re free falling.
JESSA JOYCE 