January

I feel like I crash landed from school into winter break, floundered around in an improved state for a while but still had plenty of stuff to get anxious about, barely started any actual healing from running around like crazy and feeling like a failure for the entirety of fall semester, and now in less than a week I have to return to all of it, with the stakes just as high as they were last semester and less sanity to fight with.  

I'm the team leader of my senior design project and I feel like all I do is walk around smiling at people like "let's all work together! I have no idea what to do if you don't want to put in effort!  I have no idea how to scrounge up the motivation to put in effort myself! I am afraid of you!" and project partners can smell fear everybody knows that.  I feel like a great big walking dumb with a party hat that says birthday girl and meanwhile we don't get a lot done, and this one guy does most of the work we actually do get done, and we all feel bad.

and ofcourse me and my magnificent self esteem levels are also irrationally terrified I'm gonna get fired from my internship or I'm not good enough or whatnot because I am not like super motivated to come in all the time and focus for eight hours straight on math, programming, and technical writing; I'll have the whole day open, potentially, to work because it's break, that would be a lot of money to earn, right, and I'll end up coming in for like three measly hours at the tail end of the day and being stressed the whole time.  I LOVE math, programming, and technical writing.  I just feel like I'm not doing stuff the right way, like I spent forever writing up this detailed explanation of why the math works out, and I'm worried I spent more time on it than I was supposed to, and that the logic is too outside the box, y u so quirky Tavs.  I basically understand the solution my coworker and I found to the problem we're working on down to the tiniest nuance, but it's hard to feel confident about everything I've put together when the typical result of "being myself" in real life is odd looks and awkwardness.  Which is weird because that's exactly what they hired me to do, put together a solution to a demonic vector calculus math problem that nobody has ever bothered to sit down and solve before.  And like I focused on finding creative shortcuts to things, streamlining the process, I put in some grade-A handiwork here that I basically pulled out of my personal creative rear end, spent a lot of time figuring out how to explain it all so it makes sense, and I'm worried they're gonna be like wat is this, why are you being creative and efficient when we wanted you to do something that requires creativity and efficiency.  It's like wtf brain have some faith in yourself.  And brain is like practically everyone thought we were weird in high school whenever we embraced our creativity, remember?  and of course  I DO remember and it's just hard ok.  HMM is it a coincidence I wonder that Erwin is one of my fav attack on titan characters and he's like, "hey guys, we're going on an expedition outside the walls, we'll be using this creative and efficient formation I pulled out of my personal creative rear end, please study it carefully," and everyone's like OH EM GEE U CAME UP WIT THAT URSELF U ARE SOOO SMART AND VALUABLE TO OUR CAUSE (AND ATTRACTIVE).  People who thought I was weird in high school, please take note, this was the reaction to stuff I said and did that I would have rather preferred.