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When Dreams Aren’t Enough
“I dreamed a dream in time gone by…”
September 2021
It’s my fourth week of graduate school, and I feel like I’m just drilling holes into my laptop or tablet screen for hours on end. There’s a knotted ache behind my forehead. My eyes scan pages of statistics and probability; after a while, the words and numbers seem like an alien language invented just to torment me. In the worst moments, I wonder why I am doing this to myself.
Then I remember that I can’t support myself through any qualifications I currently have, and so I duck my head for another attempt at trying to make sense of something I’ve never studied before in any form. What was I thinking? Maybe I wanted some direction so badly that I just took the first open path available to me.
Weeks ago, my first day left me feeling hopeful. Introductions commenced over discussion boards. I balked a little at the idea of a final project that required a Zoom-based oral portion as well as a report (preparation for the business world?), but I decided it would be fine. I’ve had worse through remote speech classes, hadn’t I?
The second week of school, I had to buy a new laptop because my Chromebook wasn’t cutting it with the amount of materials and programs I needed to download and analyze. I had just been celebrating the idea of…
