The Perils of Thinking Too Much

God has been very patient with me for the last couple of months.

I feel like I keep sighing in relief and admitting: “Okay, you were right. I’ll be just fine,” only to come running back to Him in a panic a few days later in order to describe in detail once again all the reasons that this really isn’t such a good idea. And I keep wanting Him to say, “Why yes, as a matter of fact, I did send you here just so you could discover once and for all that this is not what you want to do with your life. Now you can go ahead and get on with whatever you’d like to do from here.”

But He stubbornly refuses to do that. Instead he answers my complaints with good people and small moments of happiness and beautiful sunsets and little reminders that I am the one who stubbornly refuses to admit that I knew He was right in the first place and I’d be a whole lot happier if I just accepted it and moved on from there.

Yesterday I felt like I was on the verge of breakdown all day. I sat through nearly eight hours straight of classes and meetings, desperately wishing to go curl up in a corner alone somewhere to gather my thoughts in silence before having a nice heart-to-heart with Heavenly Father. I had wonderful justifications for why this time I knew once and for all that things weren’t right. It wasn’t the little things anymore. Winter may be coming on, but I’ll survive it. I have lots of sweaters and a plethora of scarves from loving family members and friends who know my fear of the cold, and the gym here isn’t so bad after all, and there are lots of people with whom to commiserate, and the School of Education is well-heated. And Ann Arbor itself is quite nice. I can walk to almost anywhere I need to go except for church and the grocery store, there are great restaurants and a twice-weekly farmer’s market and pretty parks and a real river that runs right through the center of town. And though I may miss the social atmosphere I left behind at BYU, I still have lots of friends all across the country and am finding wonderful people here as well. Besides, the grass is greener here in Michigan literally, if not figuratively.

What bothered me yesterday, then, was that things felt fundamentally wrong. My heart, I thought, is just not in this. On one hand, I am frustrated with education research in general. We talk and talk and argue about details when nothing is getting done where it matters. I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the whole academic mindset (in the education field, that is) and as interesting as the big questions are, they aren’t really answerable and they’re just complicating something that’s already so complicated I can hardly begin to wrap my mind around it. And on the other hand, I don’t particularly want to eat, drink, and breathe this stuff for the rest of my life and it sort of seems like if you want a career in academia that’s what you’ve got to do. I want to teach, to work with students, to think about what’s best for them as individuals. And I want to read good books and train for marathons and travel and learn things I’ve never had the chance to learn before. And yes, I want to be married and I want to be a mother. I clash with this academic world on a deep level (I thought yesterday) and I’m not loving it the way everyone else is and the only reason I’m really here is that I’m afraid people I know and love and want approval from will think badly of me if I quit.

But I didn’t even have the time to articulate these thoughts and they just bubbled inside me all day until I felt like I would cry if I weren’t surrounded by so many people. At last I got home and ate dinner and finished my reading and was able to close my door and kneel at my bed and plead for help. Again. And as has happened over and over again I woke up in the morning and when that panicky feeling in the back of my mind was almost unbearable, things suddenly started to fall back into place. Little things, mostly. Someone talking to me, without my asking, about something I hadn’t been sure how to do. Running into a friend out of the blue because I’d decided to leave the education building an errand in the middle of the morning. Getting invited to dinner with a fifth year math ed student/BYU alum and his family. Finding a topic for my literacy paper that I’m actually excited about researching. Realizing that I’m not stuck forever in the research project I’ve been assigned to this semester. And beginning to form a clear idea of what I am interested in, in the world of math education research. Nothing amazing happened today, but enough small things occurred to make me remember that I’m in the place I’m supposed to be, and I realized, perhaps for the first time, that this has happened over and over and over again.

Perhaps this time I will learn. But if not, at least I know that Heavenly Father is patient enough to keep pulling me through the cycle until I do.