The Dean's List

I thought that I would never see
A Dean's List that included me.
And if I keep writing like that, I never will again. When the letter arrived yesterday, followed closely by an email of the entire list, I was utterly and completely happy. It is so nice to set a goal and then reach it. It makes some (but perhaps not all) of the evenings spent studying seem worth it. And it certainly justifies the support of my friends who urged me to do the best I could, and kept telling me I could do it.
It's not a diploma, and it's not an advanced degree, but it certainly is nice.
What have I learned from this? Set a goal, figure out the intermediate steps, attack the goal one step at a time -- but not obsessively. In other words, keep the Netflix subscription and don't leave the phone turned off all the time. Go to the mall, even. But then, come back home, pick up the books (and wow, are there a lot of them this semester . . .) and get back to work.
More later. I have to go find a time management tool, a study guide for Chinese geography, and the introductory materials on the 18th century novel.

Brains Change

A friend from Seattle stopped by Saturday (hey, Karen!). Our chat made me realize just how much my brain has changed since June, when I quit my job and moved to Olympia to get ready for school. Nothing against working, but I'm beginning to believe that being in not-quite-the-right-job made me a little fuzzy. I wasn't learning new information on a daily or hourly basis in the last several jobs, and much of the intellectual stimulation was in the way of irritation, rather than discovery.

Being back in school after all this time makes me feel a little more awake. New information presented in new language keeps showing up every day, and my brain is running twice as fast as ever before to keep up. So far, this is pretty good.

(English majors, please note: the preceding paragraph is brought to you by "sandwiching," a concept that was breezily brought up in passing in ENG 203 last week.)

Another change is showing up in my spoken vocabulary: I no longer edit what I'm saying to make sure people understand me. If the right word, no matter how long, shows up in my brain during a conversation, I no longer need to mentally dig up synonyms. One of my classmates mentioned how liberating it is for her to be out of high school and in an environment where either everyone knows all the words, or knows how to get definitions out of online or paper dictionaries.

Some things about my brain have not and will not change, of course. I still have dyslexia, and the math gene simply is nowhere in my genome. Nonetheless, I'm finding new ways around these problems, to reinforce the techniques I've used over the years, so these handicaps don't have as much of a chance to hold me back.

Whatever is holding you back from doing what you really want to do, try ignoring it for a while. Imagine doing what you really want to do, step by step. If you're looking at individual steps, your handicaps may not be stumbling blocks after all, and the process of changing may make those handicaps much smaller.

At least, that's what my brain thinks.