When I first visited the Assessment Center of my friendly neighborhood community college back in May, there was no-one there. I breezed right through my English placement test (turns out, I'm ok at English). I should also mention that I wanted to take a Math placement test at the time, but that was evidently an idiotic suggestion on my part, as I hadn't studied or taken a Math class in a really, really long time, the admission of which brought on both a ramen spit-take and an unnecessarily dramatic eye roll from the bored administrator.
After teaching myself Elementary Algebra non-stop for two months, I returned to take the Math test in July and was confronted with an entirely different scene. It was something like the DMV crossed with the waiting room in Beetlejuice: packed to the gills with kids who looked like they could be in gangs (and yes: I am old enough to be scared of kids who look like they could be in gangs), many trendy Armenian and Asian teenagers, a few old ladies, and me (and it has occurred to me that to the teenagers, I am indistinguishable from the ones I call 'old ladies'). This time I had to wait an hour before I could take the test, and just did my best to keep all the Math in my head and not let it fall out of my ears before it was my turn.
The test room itself was packed with people at various stages of test-taking, which meant there was a constant stream of people getting up, brushing past, moving around and loud-whispering questions. I tried to put on the headphones provided, but the cable wouldn't stretch far enough, so I ended up with one ear on my shoulder and my hand glued to the other side of my head. Computerized, multiple-choice, 50 questions in 45 minutes, not much time to be unsure of an answer, and definitely harder than the sample questions they had provided for study, but I got through it.
The second part of the community-college-attending flop-sweat-fest is registration. Having previously attended a swanky, expensive university, I had never experienced the panicky fear of not getting into the classes I needed. It works like this: online class registration starts on a Monday, and each student is assigned a day and time they can register over the two weeks that follow. Which means you watch every day as the classes you want fill up, and you are powerless to do anything until your assigned date arrives. Fortunately I was assigned a relatively early registration day, and though I was wait-listed on two of my classes, I discovered on the first day of school that I already made it into both of them.
Did I mention that school started? Oh yes, this past Monday. Am I already overwhelmed? Oh yes, very much yes. I vacillate wildly between "I went to Princeton, I can do this," to "good God what am I doing here where is my #2 pencil," with occasional stop-offs at "I'm so much older than these children I could literally have given birth to almost all of them," and "this is a very stupid idea and I should just go back to what I already know this is a terrible idea whose idea was this."
I am realizing, in bright technicolor reality, that being ok with the idea of hard work is a very different thing than finding yourself immersed in a very large amount of hard work. Guess what? Hard work is actually hard. It is overwhelming. I am spending a lot of energy managing myself right now and not having a full-on seizure-sized freak out. Thankfully, as my friends are pointing out, I have both life experience and yoga experience to draw on. And of course, since the Universe loves a good laugh more than anything, I suddenly have more yoga clients than I know what to do with. (I'm not complaining - I'm truly grateful - but I think it's ironic that it's happening when I have suddenly no time at all and I'm beginning to transition out of this field.)
The next five years or so of my life have begun.
