Prologue: Recovery in The Stuff That's Not Interesting But Is The Most Interesting Stuff I'll Write

I spent most of the weekend trying to just get through everything that had happened.  The dire predictions of everyone in my life did nothing to alleviate my anxiety about the loss of my keys, the gigantic fine hanging over my head and the warrant.  All anyone wanted to do was talk about it, tell me how things could be worse and encourage me that these insurmountable obstacles would soon be over.

Thanks for bringing it up, everyone.

In reality, there was nothing that could be done about any of those things.  My stress and worry wasn't exactly helping the situation and it was pointless to try sit around and obsess about it.  For days that was all I did, sit and worry.  And avoid.  I was tired of my friends not understanding and making me feel awful about the whole thing... even though that wasn't their intentions.  It's not their fault that they made me feel worse, they just didn't understand that I didn't want to talk about all the things that were coming at me.

I really went through the motions for the rest of the weekend.  My keys arrived from Sacramento and I didn't go to pick up my truck until the next day.  I just didn't want to deal.  When Monday came, I found that I needed to play catch-up from having missed school for 48 hours.  (Although I was stuck on campus, I was too stressed to go to class.)  There were things happening, school-wise, that I had to continue.  I have been tutoring the exchange students from the soccer team, and I've had to devise strategies to cover material that can translate into Hebrew and Spanish.  And I was doing all that in clothes I'd worn for days and sleep-deprivation.

I was really depressed and fighting really hard to not get in a permanent state of melancholy, but I needn't have worried, because things were going to get better and I was going to learn some tough lessons...