Completely Overwhelmed

Grad school started up again, and again I'm feeling really discontent about the entire thing. Two things are really affecting my attitude this quarter: Winter Break was just long enough for me to get used to being at home all day with Sam, and I have a graduate seminar that feels like it's way over my head.

I want to get my Master's degree. I do. But I'm not sure if I can handle this level of intense reading and expectation out of me. I had a some free time today and yesterday, but that's mostly because the Martin Luther King holiday and an in-class visitor at my grad seminar on Tuesday is postponing a lot of my usual homework. If the rest of the quarter is like last week, I may lose my sanity before the quarter even ends. Seriously, I barely spent any time with Sam last week, and had 100 pages to read (which was really like 200, since they were two book pages photocopied onto one page), and will have a 20 page paper due in early March. And a presentation to do on said paper. And lead a discussion on some readings I'll have to both read and assign to the class. Oh, and I don't really understand what people are talking about in class. I really wanna cry just thinking about it.

I feel just so unprepared for grad school. Some of my classes are undergrad courses, which are fine and I can handle, but the graduate classes are so long and difficult that I feel like college did not at all prepare me for what is now expected of me. Everyone seems like they've already done so much research and reading before they even got to grad school, that it makes me feel like I went to class without having done my homework, even though no one said that I had to know so much before I even got here. I feel stupid - and I know I just started the course, and I know it's my first year - but I look at my fellow first year students and I see just how little I know and understand, even just about the whole grad school process. I'm not even sure if this is my passion anymore. I want to learn, and I still love Japan, but I'm not sure if it's a strong enough love for the level of commitment my program is asking for. It's depressing me, and making me scared, and I really don't know what to do.

I want to learn, but I feel like I don't want to learn how the program wants me to learn. I just want to know what things are and how things work and how to do things and why things are the way they are. I don't want to analyze why so-and-so's criticism reflects this other person's ideas about authorship and canonicity in literature. I don't care about criticism or the function of the author's name in a work. In fact, that's the kind of pretentious bullshit I want to avoid. But it's a required class. So what choice do I have?

I feel bad about my attitude toward school right now, partly because Sam will be applying for grad school soon. I really want to encourage him to get his MA so he can get a stable job and start a career. It'll be good for him, and for us as a whole. And his experience and program might be way different from mine. But I don't know if it's the program or the school or grad school in general or something about me... but I'm feeling really overwhelmed and out of place and just unhappy with school. And I don't know what to do, because I've got all these loans now, and no income of our own, and the economy is so bad right now, so I'm not sure that even if I were to decide to quit, if I really could. And then the thought of getting a part time job on top of all this other shit going on with school and commuting... It's enough to make me wanna tear out my hair.

I know it's just another year and a half. I know how quickly that much time can go by. I know that an MA can really open doors for me jobwise. But I also know we'll be in a lot of debt, and that a degree doesn't necessarily mean a better-paying job. And if these past 3 or 4 months is any indication, a year and a half can also feel like an eternity. And my worst fears are that I somehow won't be able to graduate on time, and will have to take out more loans, or that the job I find after I graduate won't pay even as much as my Technicolor job did.

I should think positively. I know I should. It could all turn out for the best. And yet, I'm still really scared that I may have made a mistake going back to school.