I finished...(finally)!

I signed up for the instructional design degree this past January and it was amazing. I really enjoyed my classes and loved the challenge of completing them as quickly as possible. I finished all twelve classes by March 17th and then I got scared. The capstone intimidated me. I thought I could complete it fairly quickly if I just got going on it, but I couldn't seem to bring myself to get going. I basically shut down.

March ended, all of April rolled by, and then (shocking even myself) May completely passed. I began to imagine the possibility of not completing the program and just accepting the knowledge I learned from the program and counting it as worth the price. I avoided my school emails because I didn't want to face the concern of my capstone facilitator. I avoided phone calls from my mentor. I kept saying I'd spend the weekend working on my capstone and then I did anything I could to not find the time on the weekends for schoolwork.

Josh used to ask me if I was planning on working on my schoolwork each night. I'd shrug and watch a lot of tv instead. He normally leaves me to my own insane goals, but it really made me feel guilty that he would bring up my school so often. I could tell he was anxious for me to not lose this opportunity. I spent a lot of sleepless nights worrying about not graduating. It would give me the worst insomnia and then I'd be depressed and exhausted all the next day when I'd have to  start over with the denials and the time-wasting. I kept analyzing my chances for graduation as each day slipped by but I could not bring myself to resume work on my capstone. I didn't want to pay for another semester and I didn't want to end the semester without the degree and most importantly I didn't want to finish my capstone to earn the degree during my current semester. So I kept going around and around inside my own head. I lost my motivation to clean or cook or even regularly change out of my pajamas. And since I was pregnant, I grew more and more lethargic with each increasingly hot month. I can barely move now without some sort of discomfort and my stress has gotten so out of hand that I was hospitalized for high blood pressure and chronic headaches. That was ridiculous. Something had to give.

Now, granted, a lot of this crazy thinking is just typical pregnancy brain for me. I struggled with the exact same thing as an MBA student when I was pregnant with Scarlet. (Why do I keep thinking that pregnancy is a smart time to earn a master's degree?) I couldn't motivate myself to complete my classes then either. I had insomnia then too, and all my fears and doubts and concerns would pile themselves on top of me until I couldn't breathe and I certainly couldn't sleep. For me to slowly, grudgingly stir myself from my stupor this time around, I had to have my poor mentor beg me to contact her or she'd be forced to kick me out of the program.

So I emailed my mentor to indicate I'd still like to work on my program requirements even though it was June 4 and I had less than a month to complete my entire capstone and oral defense. But she was forgiving and kind and didn't offer a single word of rebuke, which--as a people pleaser--would have made me shrivel up and want to hide some more. Instead, I was motivated to please my mentor since I felt like I owed her for all those weeks of neglect.

I jumped right into my capstone. I worked on it every night. I worked on it through the three-day weekend. I worked on it in the car on the drive down to Las Vegas and on the drive back to Salt Lake. I worked on it while my youngest sister was in town to visit after returning from her mission. I didn't give myself a night off until I had completed the entire capstone and submitted everything.

Then my facilitator took over and helped me get my tasks approved and even helped me come up with my research questions. She scheduled my oral defense before all of my tasks had been passed because she was so confident that they would pass. That left me having to create my presentation as quickly as possible. I had to discuss my research study for at least 30 minutes and use my created slides to present the information. I practiced my presentation exhaustively in preparation for my oral defense while developing a nice summery cold, and then I presented my defense with a raspy voice and a runny nose. Totally, totally worth it because my facilitator was all praise and admiration for the amount of work I did and the speed with which I completed it. In 21 days I had completed my entire capstone class. My facilitator was so nice that she graded the presentation within the hour so that I'd get to see this little jewel in my student portal before the day was over:

Oh yeah! Finished all my classes with a whopping five days left in the term! So now I am nursing my cold in victory and Josh and I have dinner plans to celebrate tomorrow night (so I can recover a bit from this silly cold) and I'm just so so relieved. My stress headache is already smaller and I can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel. There's just one more pending event in roughly nine days that I need to wait on before I'll be able to take a maternity leave and possibly get a good night's sleep (yeah, yeah, even I don't see it happening but I like to dream). I am so happy to have taken that program, I'm so happy I finished it, and I'm so, so happy I was able to take away a diploma before my first term ended. All of my school goals have now been met and although I may never pursue another degree, if I do I'll reread this post so that I remember how difficult it was...and possibly how worth it that it can be so long as I finish what I started.