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Ichabod!

09 December 2003 00:54

i may be doing a semester summary a lil bit early, but i think it might be worth it. a trying but great band season. awesome friends. light schedule with great classes. a nice apartment. only one major depressed episode, possibly pms/pmdd related. only one major, lingering illness. fun concerts/events. three good trips to pa. overall . . . pretty darn good!

and i think at first i was really confused by everything going so well. i didnt know what to think of my newfound contentment, what to do with this newfound happiness. only the semester before, i was reflecting on how every semester seemed worse than the one before it. i was stressed, depressed, sick, sleep deprived.

in fact, havent i been under some kind of mental strain for almost as long as i can remember? i didnt even realize until i was seventeen how much of an effect my parents divorce had had on me, but i know now that it really took its toll on me. from the age of eight and getting used to two homes, to appearing before the judge for the custody case at thirteen (god, my heart still shudders when i think of that. i felt so alone.), to waking up on my sixteenth birthday and having my mom say "well, now your dads been gone for half your life."

it still hurts. my eyes are tearing up now, just thinking about it.

ive always seen myself reacting to these situations and working/living/existing under almost contsant mental stress. i know what im like then, and how i deal with that. what i havent seen and what i dont know, is what im like when everything is ok. and i guess thats what im finding out now. it seems like a lot of the major stresses in my life have been removed. neither of my parents are very directly involved in my life, and the last three semesters of the physics major arent too too demanding.

you know what the best part is? now that im finding out how i act under very little stress, i dont think ill ever react to those stressful situations in the same way. i think ill be able to deal with them much better, knowing where my ground state is. (i mean ground state in the physics sense, picturing my life as some kind of potential well. when stressed, i jump to an excited state. or i can release stress/energy, and fall back to my ground state.)

i think i like the picture of a potential well better than the idea of being at the bottom of a well when most stressed/depressed, or rock bottom as some might say. cause then if you get to the top, youre at the peak of a potential and thats an unstable equilibrium. the ground state at the bottom of a potential well is a stable equilibrium, and for the harmonic oscillator, we know by the uncertainty principle that theres a zero point energy, meaning that in the ground state it actually moves about the bottom of the well. theres no absolute static contenment, every day life always contains a few ups and downs even in the ground state. and i like the idea of relating stress to the energy that moves a particle to the excited states, cause then absorbing stress means jumping to an excited state, and releasing stress means falling back t the ground state and the stable equilibrium. . . . my god, im SUCH a DORK.