First, I’ll give you a cute-kins pic in case you want to stop reading now.  This was from her first year of life…she may have been six months old or so, so she was still lanky and gangly, and she was also still sociable to strangers and loved me 😦

Anyway, as the title of the blog implies, sometimes I need to do a little navel-gazing and write an actual inner monologue.

I honestly can’t remember if I included this in my last blog, and I don’t feel like bringing it up to see, but, as we were on the way home two weeks ago, after triumphantly having survived “the wedding,” I received an email from my advisor….delicately telling me that I was going to need to defer graduation to the spring.  I felt two emotions simultaneously:  failure and relief…failure because I’d already had to defer graduation once and I was really looking forward to having my degree and being done with school, and relief because, deep down, I knew that there was going to be no way I was going to manage to get it done in one semester.

I really shouldn’t have felt the failure, I know, because my “mental holocaust” took over the latter part of last year and the first two-thirds of this year, and September and October have been consumed by dread of “the dress” and the stress of major, major changes at work.  I should have felt proud that I’d gotten as much done on my thesis as I did through all of that, and my advisor pretty much told me that.  Anyway, I’ve embraced the relief and am looking forward to having three more months or so to really get the thesis together and to just enjoy the research and writing process, while still being able to write on the blog and read books that I *want* to read.  I’m shooting for a February defense.

So, this brings me to the meat of the post today (I know, it’s been super-long already)…for the past several months, I have been pretty out-of-control…eating waaaay too much, living off chinese takeout and pizza (and thus pissing away lots of money), drinking waaaay too much coffee, not sleeping, not paying attention to my own well-being, picking at my arms and hands mercilessly, no longer cleaning the house, waking up feeling burpy, crampy, nauseated, and ashamed.  This is no way to live.

To top it all off, Joey and I were both so stressed that we completely forgot that our tenth anniversary was Thursday (the anniversary of when we got together, not when we got married, although for us, the former has traditionally been more important to us than the latter).  He remembered it at 4:45 this morning.

I also can’t remember if I mentioned this already, but I was diagnosed with PCOS at the end of September.  I’ve been having issues off and on all year, and I finally got checked out, and even though I’m not thrilled about the diagnosis, it explains some of my other health issues, and I’m happy just to know what it is.  However, I also know that the way I’m eating is only aggravating the condition.

As usual, I woke up early this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, although I can legitimately blame it on the time change (it would have been my normal wake-up time), and as I was laying in bed catching up on my Google Reader, I read my friend Allison’s blog post on True Repentance.  And I had one of those moments in the shower this morning as I really contemplated the way I’ve been treating my body for the past year.  Obviously, I’ve also been neglecting my soul, pretty much ignoring my Bible and tossing out quick prayers each morning for protection for my parents and Joey and healing for Phil and my friend Tiffany’s mom.  Talk about getting shamed first thing in the morning, right?

So, needless to say, I’m turning away from all of this.  And it’s going to be painfully hard to break the past year’s worth of habits.  But it’s going to happen.

Thanks, guys…I really do love my few and faithful readers.  And, for those of you who powered through this, here’s another Kins-pic for you as a reward: