Stumbling blocks.

It's 3:37. It's the first night of my "break" for summer. I took my last two finals today and I have literally NOTHING to worry about. I'm tired and I know that's all it is but I feel like I'm thiiiiiiis close to a panic attack or a breakdown or something. Nothing doing. Gotta keep it together. Failure is not an option. :)

Why am I such a night owl? Granted, I'm more creative and expressive in the middle of the night...but I HATE this. The second I'm on my own, I start screwing around and wind up not sleeping. Unavoidable but damn if it doesn't suck. I have no self control, no internal clock, and I start to feel like I'm losing my sh*t a little bit.

And I'm in this weird, reflective, melancholic, puzzled, angry mood and I just can't set myself straight. Here lately I've been dwelling on the things I can't change. I get hung up on the fact that my mom just finished cancer treatment for lung cancer. She's in remission but, Christ, the statistics are a nightmare. I know I should be grateful for the time we've been given. I should thank God that we found it soon enough to do something about it. (More on the God question in a minute).

On the subject of my mom/my family, I feel like I have to shoulder a burden that no 21 year old should have. I have no financial responsibilities for my family, but I feel like I've given up something, some critical part of myself to maintain this relative normalcy in myself in order to maintain normalcy in my family. I don't feel like myself anymore. I'm sure it's some stupid, imaginary construct, but it gets frustrating. I feel like I have emotional needs that aren't being met by my family anymore. My grandmother is such a blessing because I feel like she's got this iron will and steel-strong character that lets her deal with everything in our lives with such grace and dignity. Maybe she's screaming on the inside, but I'm damned if I see it. I think she truly, genuinely finds happiness in the small things which keeps her from shattering under the strain of the big things. I envy her that. I want to be like her in the face of all this. Until then, I fake it with aplomb and try to be cheerful to spite it all.

My mom is sort of a thorn in my side lately. I worry about her constantly. I think about her pretty much every minute of every day. I dream about her (when I sleep). It's been a tough few months. It's hard to worry about someone that much. And it gets frustrating. It feels like the only thing that exists sometimes. I just want her to be better and sometimes I'm not 100% sure that she's emotionally capable of being the same person she used to be. And I shouldn't grieve for that the way I am, but I can't help it. Even if you live through cancer, what price do you have to pay? How much of your life do you have to give up just to keep on living?

I'm even feeling insecure in my relationship which hasn't happened since last summer before this cancer ball started rolling downhill, and when things were really bad between us. I regret the choices I made, but I don't regret the lessons I learned. Lately, though I'm beginning to find everything a little suffocating, so I treat MK like crap just because I'm so angry and frustrated. It's not always him that's wearing me down, but I almost always take it out on him. It's incredibly unfair to him and the fact that he just deals with it makes me (on some irrational level), feel like he doesn't care or doesn't understand me. It's so trite, but I honestly don't feel like he gets me sometimes. But we will work it out. We always work it out.

But the biggest question on my mind lately is how I feel about my faith. When we first found out mom was sick, I tried to find comfort in God, tried to talk to dead relatives in heaven...anything to find some peace, some incontrovertible affirmation that God was putting us through this hell for a reason. It's been almost a year and I have come up empty handed. And really, really empty.In the past, when I've been afraid, reliance on God was a relief. Believing that everything has a cause helped me. God's supreme plan made me feel like there was a map for this crazy journey through life, I just couldn't see the whole picture. Now, I don't know if there's a map at all. Maybe I've just wandered off into the margins. Or maybe there's no map at all.

Shocking. I hate to even say it out loud because I'm afraid of the implications of saying that I'm not sure whether there's a God or not. I guess believing in God is such an ingrained thing that it's become a part of me. But now, after everything I've been through personally, and with my family, I'm really not so sure anymore. The only thing that gives me pause is something my mom said to me in Dr. Mehta's office when we were going through the diagnosis process. We were sitting in this tiny exam room, waiting to hear what the prognosis was gonna be, what we could expect, if she even had a shot. Mom said to me that she had been laying awake the night before, stressing about everything and afraid and she said she felt warm arms around her. She told me (as, of course, we both started crying) that she didn't know if it was daddy (who died three years ago) or Nannie (my great grandmother who died several years ago), or God. I hope it was all three.