Anxiety... but What's Really the Big Picture?

It's about two weeks into summer vacation, and I've averaged about 5 hours of sleep each night.
Each night, I delay sleeping until I'm nice and exhausted. I trudge upstairs, turn off the lights, settle into bed in comfy pajamas, close my eyes, lie there.

Lie there.
Think.
Toss and turn.
Lie there.

I think about my day. About what I'll do tomorrow. About what my life will by like in university (45 days left until the move out). About who I will be, what I'll try to change, how scary and stressful and fun it'll be.
Like an endless pattering of rain, thoughts keep me awake.

I end up dozing off around 3:00 am most nights, and I wake up abruptly around 7:00 am or 8:00 after a bunch of muddled, choppy dreams. Last night featured a couple dreams. In the first, I was playing piano (which I haven't actually done in months), sight reading through some song in my Gr. 10 book, when my parents pass by talking about packing. I realize I have one day left to pack and freak out, because I also have plans to hang out with friends. Dream the second featured my friends coming together to tell me that they were coming to Massachusetts too, to help me settle in.

Conclusions? I have serious packing anxiety (this is the third or fourth packing-related dream). And I miss my friends.

All my life I've not been overly anxious, but definitely a wallower. I think, and I think, and I think about trivial things and future things and past things endlessly if I have the time. It's never been a great trait, and most of my hobbies developed to cope with that (knitting and sewing and cooking and studying and other things to block out my incessantly chattering brain). Recently it's led a lot more to anxiety, I suppose since I'm at the cusp of the largest event of my adolescent life, the border between high school and college, life at home and life on campus.

And my anxieties keep piling higher. As much as I'm excited to commence a new life in Cambridge, I know the life I've painstakingly built here will suffer as a result. Moreoever, the expectations, the standards, are higher than ever. My parents, once fairly cut off from the extended family, has gotten back in touch recently, and I know it's out of pride for their Harvard daughter.

But then today, I went to Chapters, and I read part of Marina Keegan's book, The Opposite of Loneliness.
A couple of months ago, an article popped up in my Facebook feed about Marina Keegan. A recent graduate of Yale, had an internship at The New York Times and a job set up for her after her graduation, who believed firmly in pursuing one's passions, and who had been killed in a car crash. It was hard to read.

Today, I stumbled upon the post-humously published collection of her writing, fiction and non-fiction,
including the essay from which the book took it's title:

http://yaledailynews.com/crosscampus/2012/05/27/keegan-the-opposite-of-loneliness/

I read half of the book right there in the store. And though I may be anxious still, Keegan's writings reaffirmed something for me: anxiety might be there, the looming of the future might always intimidate me, but life, and the world, remain beautiful.

But are ultimately, short-lived.

So I'm not sure where this blog post was supposed to go. It doesn't have a set destination, like a lot of things don't.

I think I'll take a nap now.
-cookielime