I've made a start on sorting out my bookcases. The main reason for doing this is that I've replaced some of my books with Kindle books and see no reason to keep the actual books anymore. I started with the bookcases that hold all my personal books - the ones I've read that I've kept and the ones I've yet to read. I still have loads of actual books that I'm keeping to read, I couldn't bear not to have real books around me. Then I got round to my academic bookcase; the one that holds all of my text books, essay books, the classics etc all from my English Lit degree. I maybe should have avoided starting on those books today after my sadness of yesterday. I can't seem to bring myself to think of getting rid of them quite yet.
The bookcase has made me cry. It holds all of my hope and ambition from four years ago; it holds everything I thought I was working towards. There are already books I had bought in preparation for my third year that I didn't get to start and now never will.
It's made me realise that this sadness I feel at stopping my degree isn't coming from my fear that I'm making the wrong decision; it's coming from the process of letting go of it. I think there's part of me that feels grief at what my life would have been if things had been different. And it's actually probably quite normal that I feel like that.
Everything changed the day that I knew my Mum was going to be diagnosed with a terminal illness and since the day we lost her my life has been turned on its head. In some ways I think it's only now that I'm getting to grips with what has happened to me over the last two years.
The biggest thing I'm starting to understand is that I don't think it would be healthy for me to be back in an academic environment right now. The last thing I need is to be reading books and analysing them and dwelling on what I can see of my own life in them. My head needs activity; I need to get lost in cooking and baking and walking and gardening and even housework. I need practical things to occupy me. The only books I want to read are the ones I get lost in purely because I'm enjoying them so much, I don't want pressure to read certain things.
So my decision is that I'm going to quit my degree. I may come back to it at some point in the future but it's not for me right now. And I'm going to allow myself a little while to be sad about it. But then I have to pick myself up, look to the future and figure out what it is that I want to do with my life.
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