40 days and 40 nights

I owe a large amount of money to a financial institution in Texas who holds all my student loans. These have been in various stages over the past 9 years… deferment, forbearance, and now IBR (income based repayment). I have repaid a meager amount considering.

Recently, I was able to once again put the loans into the IBR mode. All I had to do was to fill out the request form and send that plus my most recent tax return and the low payment would be in place.

The other night, in the middle of the night, I woke up in a state of panic. I remembered seeing an email letting me know that I had a message awaiting me in my EdFinancial inbox. To my dismay, I suddenly had the thought that I didn’t send in the forms! They wouldn’t offer me the repayment option again! The payment was due on March 1! It was a full blown panic attack. The rest of the night was shot as far as sleep was concerned.

The next morning early, I began looking for the paperwork so that I could hurriedly get it in. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Finally, I looked upstairs and found the folder…but the forms I needed were missing.

Suddenly, I remembered…I had mailed in the forms the day after these were requested. The panic slowly receded from my body. Everything was ok.

The point of the retelling of the crazy scene is this:

There is so much drama in my life. Between trying to act as a source of encouragement to several people in my house who have different sources of anxiety plus trying to make certain that all things that need to be done by these people actually get done, there never seems to be enough time for me to do the things I need to do…for ME.

Obviously, that problem is causing me some of my own anxiety…and as I have already noted, I am a fairly anxious person all by myself.

So, in these 40 days and 40 nights, I am exploring that anxiety…which often shows its ugly head as anger. In that I process best when writing, I am not only exploring but trying to find new ways to alleviate the anxiety so that it turns into something positive rather than negative. Right now, I feel very negative.

I don’t know how long this will work, but for the moment, I am focusing on the inward aspects of self with a hope that it will clear a path to better see beyond. For now…we will see where it leads.