girl breaks down. boy puts back together again.

(warning: it'll take me a minute and seem a little random, but i swear it will all come together and relate to my valentine's day craft. just stick with me, here)

it has been said, in my life, that i have tendencies toward perfectionism.
and anxiety.

and, let me tell you, when things are constantly happening imperfectly (as they do in such an imperfect world) and nothing ever happens exactly as planned (as they shouldn't when you can't control others around you, nor life events in general - despite one's best efforts), it's easy to become quickly overwhelmed.

i am easily swallowed up in my thinking about success and perfectionism and to constantly feel not quite good enough is exhausting. . . . . and graduate school isn't exactly the place to go to feel better.

it's easy to suddenly feel incompetent, like you don't have enough focus, and haven't found an advisor fast enough, and must be the only one that has ever found biostatistics to be incomprehensible at times, and you are the only one to have yet to publish  . . . meanwhile your fellow students have things together and are super intelligent and somehow are managing to survive this crazy place with ease. and outside those walls your other friends actually have social lives, and are getting exciting jobs, moving up in the world, having babies, affording new cars and buying houses. . . . .

i quickly spiral into a tizzy of tears and worries and what started as "i had a bad meeting with my possible advisor this morning" soon becomes " . . . i'm going to fail out of school soon and we'll be poor, in debt, and unhappy, and i may as well complete our food stamp and public housing applications tonight" (which, of course, are already saved in pdf form on my desktop).


 . . . . . . . ok. so "tendencies" toward anxiety might be a bit generous.

but to feel a left behind and not-so-perfect in both worlds is hard. and for some reason that matters to me.

and for michael . . . he couldn't care less.

he says that he'd be happy with just me, living in this little apartment, with our mountains of student loans, unable to ever afford kids or buy a house, or go on fancy vacations. his life plans lack the strict deadlines mine has. he says he doesn't care what our friends are doing and that whatever happens in our life is how things are supposed to be.

he says it every. single. time.

 and you know, i'm actually starting to think he means it.


(note to self: apparently, not everyone views life as a race and competition)

sigh . . . i tell you all of this because it was the impetus of my valentine's present. which, despite it being a disaster, i thought i'd share, since my crafting is otherwise nonexistent these days.

so a few weeks ago my sister pinned this and never in my life has something summed far too many of my evenings as well as this.

and i immediately went to etsy to purchase it, only to see the nearly $400 price tag. ouch.

so i've sat around thinking about how i could make something with the saying on it myself.

and then i saw this. a beautifully stenciled pillow. both chic and useful.

it was perfect. i could stencil this onto a a little throw pillow for our bed. . . . .

only, it didn't turn out quite like that at all.

for starters, it was just far too many words for a little pillow. so although i attempted to fit it all in, that failed. so the front side is far too squished. and then it ends on the back, which looks ok - but is more spaced out than i wanted.

i just couldn't win with this one.

oh well. my not-so-perfect craft from a not-so-perfect girl is good enough for michael.

it can be hard to realize plans don't work out just so - that your path in life is not the same as those around you - that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

and not only is that ok, it's perfect.