thinking out loud.

I recently finished my oral comprehensive ethics exam. It was kind of a big deal. With its completion, I am presumed competent enough to apply out to internship sites this fall, I am officially considered a 'Ph.D Candidate,' and I have completed another program milestone. I actually don't know that I passed and won't for another couple weeks but I feel that I did. I feel that it went very well and have no qualms with counting my chickens, as it were.

This test was something that certainly inspired a fair degree of anxiety, nervousness, and worry in the weeks and days leading up to it. Of course such a thing would. I wavered back and forth between feeling confident and woefully unprepared. It didn't help that my cohort is such a bright and dedicated bunch of gals who at any given time seem far more prepared and suited to the profession than I feel that I do.

Those feelings of woeful unpreparedness and catastrophication were happening in a different place compared to the feelings of confidence and ease. My dreams were haunted by ethical issues for several nights before the test. My stomach clenched and wrenched and toiled for weeks before the exam. That feeling of being hungry all the time, hardly being able to eat, and yet also wanting to throw up was a familiar companion over the past week or so. I could feel my jaw tightening and clenching late in the evening before bed - sure signs I've resumed grinding my teeth. I felt the worry and the doubt. In my body.

My confidence and ease happens in my mind. In my thoughts. Throughout this pressure filled time, I was able to keep a pretty optimistic attitude. While feeling all of these extremely uncomfortable feelings, I was telling myself that everything would work out, that I tend to do well on these sorts of things, and all kinds of other positive things that I know to be true. Others would ask how I was doing, how things were going. I would say that it was fine, that I was doing real well, that things were coming along and everything would go well.

And I wasn't lying. I felt that. I do feel that. And that's what happened. But my physiology betrays me. It's incongruent with my thoughts. If body and mind are essentially one, intrinsically interconnected, than what does that say about me and my experience? Was I fooling myself? When does positive thinking and optimism become denial? Does it matter?