Decisions

I often have a hard time making decisions. When I go out to eat, I often don’t know exactly what I’m going to order until it actually comes out of my mouth (I’m sure I’m not alone in this), and if there is a decision to be made I prefer not to make it until I absolutely have to. When there is no deadline for commitment, I run into trouble. I will wander around a clothes store for half an hour trying to figure out if I really, really want that shirt, and if so do I want it in red or green, solid or patterned, and do I want to shell out another few dollars for the pair of socks? Or I will spend a week looking at cookbooks before I actually decide what to make for dinner next Sunday, and then I will question my decision when I actually go to the grocery store to buy the ingredients.

Similarly, I will waver about decisions that actually will have an effect on my life like, say, whether or not I should I should drop a class. That was my big decision of this past week, and I’m quite proud of myself for actually making it (though I had the benefit of an add/drop deadline to help me along, and believe me, I waited until the very day to make the drop). This was a good decision for me. Everyone I talked to about my decision said, very sincerely, “That sounds like a good decision,” and not one of them suggested that I might want to reconsider. None of my reasons for keeping the class were good reasons, and all of my (many) reasons for dropping it were. I knew this, and still I hesitated.

One of the problems is that I have memories of my early college years. I used to panic at the beginning of every semester when I attended all my classes and looked at my syllabi (syllabuses?) and listened to all the course requirements. I made last-minute schedule rearrangements almost every semester as an undergraduate. And inevitably things would turn out to be just fine after all. In fact, there were a few semesters when I was downright bored and almost wished I had kept a class I had dropped. I generally underestimated my ability to handle scholastic pressures, and I still have this lingering feeling that I’m blowing things out of proportion, that I will do just fine with whatever I have on my plate. So dropping a class made me feel a bit uneasy, like I was backing out of something that really wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.

Except that this time I really do think it was as bad as I thought it was. Every time I tried to talk myself out of dropping the course, I reminded myself that for three days straight this past week I was so stressed that I was physically ill, that I had a hard time even getting myself to eat (when normally I always eat regular meals), that I was very much on the verge of a breakdown. And it’s only the second week of school, and I haven’t even begun making field visits, of which I will have nearly twice as many to make as I did last semester. Without losing sleep, friends, and quite possibly sanity, it was going to be literally impossible to keep up and actually get anything out of my classes and devote as much attention to my students as I need to and, perhaps most importantly, be happy. I know myself a lot better than I did my freshman and sophomore years of college and I am not blowing this out of proportion. Maybe it wouldn’t have been quite as bad as I thought, but it would be close.

So I have dropped qualitative methods. Right now I am not sitting in qualitative methods, and that makes me very happy. Don’t worry, I’m not wasting the time I suddenly freed up for myself because this blog entry is only taking me about twenty minutes (please ignore any grammatical errors because I’ve got reading to get to). I just didn’t want to lose my readership because I went two weeks without writing.

And now I’m back to the grindstone. Except that now I can actually focus on the words I’m reading, take things in, think things through, and (hopefully) actually enjoy what I’m doing.