I’m going to start doing more daily writing if I can. I feel it gets some things out of my system and allows me to vent, but it also gives me a place to recap how I was or what I was doing on those days.

I started today waking up in kind of a weird fog. I finally woke up out of it and took Maverick on a walk. I took some interesting pictures of a couple of doorway and entryway garden areas around the house, and I found them interesting.

I got ready, took Thomas to school, and immediately started my day in Kim’s office because today is the last reporting day of the quarter and comments were due at 8 a.m. I checked in with her to make sure everything was good. I then went on to find out that the testing platform we have to use for ACT is not working, and that brought back a lot of anxiety. I’m trying to remain calm because I know these are problems I can work through, but the timelines that coexist with other timelines are making things difficult.

Report cards—which I haven’t been able to make the comments work for—have to be sent out on Friday. They have to be right. This is my ship to sail, and I want it to look like we put time and effort and energy and care into what everybody sees. I’m greatly stressed over this. I nearly had—not a panic attack—but what I believe we looked up was a collapse response. I don’t know what it really is; I just know that I didn’t even feel like a real person last week. Tuesday and Wednesday especially were very difficult. I had a lot of dark thoughts, low energy, and no care for anything.

So I say all that to say stress is something I’m not looking to add on to, but it’s a necessary evil in this case—or at least I feel it is. Maybe that speaks more to either how I want others to perceive me or what I want to put out into the world. I feel like it’s what I want to put out into the world, but I can’t help but feel that there’s a little bit of the other two.

I stressed over a lot of other things today, but I came back and worked and stressed over the report cards again and again and again and again until I finally got them to output what I was looking for. Then I continued to work on it over and over and over until I felt it was something I could even show others. I’m proud of the work I’ve done, but it’s taken more out of me than I ever expected.

Anyway, I worked on the report cards again when I got home, and I think I’ve basically got them to where they’re acceptable. They’re still not perfect, but they’re at a level I find acceptable.

I did get to have a nice dinner with Erika and Thomas. We had a pretty fun time, just the three of us having a normal dinner. Maybe I need to focus on that kind of stuff more.