I slept for a solid 7 hours last night at Matt and Sarah1′s house after the party. Then, after Zack and I packed up our stuff & came home, I slept from 11:30 am to 7:30 pm. I might have been a wee bit exhausted.

Sarah1 and I wondered yesterday if I was going to have some kind of a post-nursing school crash. Now that the NCLEX and the stresses of school are behind me, I don’t have anything pressing to worry about. On good days, I think that leaving nursing school behind is going to be good for my mental health. After all, I didn’t have to start taking meds for my depression until after nursing school started, right? So surely now that it’s over, I’ll be better? Maybe? On bad days, I fear that leaving school behind will be bad for me. It sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but having that one, big, overwhelming thing in my life that I had to focus on all of the time kept me from thinking about much of anything else. No matter what I was doing, I always had a running list in my head of things that I needed to be doing. I lived by my calendar, and living by a calendar has its benefits. I didn’t have a lot of down time to ponder my life or my feelings or the status of my mental health. Distraction isn’t the same as healing, but it does wonders in terms of restoring functionality.

I’m hoping that today isn’t an indication of the future. I’m hoping that the fact that I slept for 8 hours in the middle of the afternoon is some kind of a fluke, and mostly the result of having thrown Zack a huge birthday party 3 days after I took the biggest test of my life. I’m going to believe that is the case. I’m going to get some positive juju going for myself and believe that moving on from school is going to be good for me. And if I decide that my positive juju isn’t going to be strong enough to ensure this post-graduation time period to be funk-free, I’ll change the plan. Instead, I’ll just focus on the simple fact that once I start working, it’s going to feel just like I’m back in school again for (at least) a little while. The biggest difference is that this time, I’ll be wearing the same color scrubs as everyone else.

I woke up this morning with my gums all puffy and realized, there’s no denying it. I’m all stressed out again.

I’ve been a little funky for the last few days. Listening to a lot of sad music. No appetite. Sleeping more than I should be. Not able to focus on finishing this last bit of school that I have left. I’ve even been a little short & snappy with Zack. I always know that things are getting bad when I get frustrated with him. He seriously does everything in his power to make me happy, and he does it all of the time, and he does it without complaining. He is patient and kind and he loves to make me happy, and he’s really, really good at it. So when I get short & snappy with him, I know it’s bad. And it’s been bad.

Monday I slept until 1:00 in the afternoon, and then after I was up, I walked around the house like a zombie. When Zack was getting ready to leave for work, I walked into our room and sat down on the bed to watch him get ready. He knew I was sad; he’d been watching me get worse for days. We hadn’t talked about it yet, though. He asked me if I was okay, and I shook my head. He offered to stay home for the day. “This is what Family Days are for, Sarah,” he told me. “I can stay here. It’s no problem.” I told him he didn’t have to do that. I had already made plans to go eat dinner with Sarah1, and she is kind of like a depression safehouse for me. Not only do my nieces make me as happy as anyone ever can, Sarah1′s trained to deal with people who feel like I feel, so I am always comfortable just being myself when I am there. She can handle it.

Sarah1 and I talked at dinner about what’s happening. She asked what’s going on with me and I told her that I felt like I was falling back into the sadness again. It doesn’t seem like I should be, right? I mean, I’m graduating in 2 weeks. I am going on vacation to Hawaii with Zack after graduation. I’m almost done with nursing school. This should be a time of exclamation marks and celebrations! But instead of focusing on all that good, I can only think about the flip side. I’m almost done with nursing school, and that means that I don’t have a LIFE PLAN anymore. I don’t know what’s next. I don’t have a job lined up. I don’t know where Zack and I are going to choose to live. I don’t know much of anything.

For so many years, I’ve had plans, and these plans dictated my every move. I wanted to be a nurse, and it was a long road getting here. I formulated very involved and intricate plans; I broke my master plan down into bite-sized achievable steps. I knocked the steps out one-by-one. Sometimes I counted the steps left. That’s how specific the plan was. It was quantifiable. Admittedly, not everything went exactly according to the original plan, nevertheless, here I am. I’m at the end of the plan. I’m out of steps. All of my choices for the last four years have been meticulously orchestrated to arrive at this very point, and now it’s over.

I know this is technically eustress. Graduating is a good thing, and moving on with my life is a good thing. Starting my career is a good thing. It’s just that, as Wikipedia brilliantly notes, “The body itself cannot physically discern between distress or eustress.” Stress, whether it’s distress or eustress, is still stress. It’s still hard on the body. It’s still change, and it’s still the unknown, and it’s still outrageously scary. I know it’s good, I swear I do. I know! It’s good! And I promise, I’ve been telling myself that it’s good each night as I cry myself to sleep and each day as I bargain with myself to get out of bed in the mornings.