i check my face.
i look a little bit older.
i look a little bit colder.
with one deep breath, and one big step, i move a little bit closer.
i move a little bit closer.
for reasons unknown.

you know how the first gulp of fresh air tastes after holding your breath for as long as you possibly can? the taste that vacillates between chastising ourselves for depriving our lungs of its most vital import and the self-congratulations of how much more appreciative of oxygen we are once we've experienced life without it?

yeah.

that.

it has literally taken me over a week to write this blog. partly because it's so hard to find the right words to appropriately summarize what i've learned this year. but mostly because of the percoset.

battered wife syndrome should certainly not be mishandled for the sake of analogy, but being called "irreverent" entitles me to use it anyway. recent reports indicate that i am suffering from a few of the general characteristics psychologists associate with the syndrome:

(it turns out that aside from 90% of the classes i took this year, majoring in psychology wasn't a complete waste of my time.)

1. the woman believes that the violence was her fault.

after ten months of being a 1-B (which is kind of like being a 1-L, but 9 letters off and one more year), i am emerging on the other side a little battered. unless you count the effects of sleep deprivation on my quality of life and the hours of sitting in class on my depressed sciatic nerve, no one -- thank g-d -- has physically hurt me, although my self-esteem has been tossed around like the popular girl in high school. i can't recall a time in my life, other than drama camp in 5th grade, when i have ever felt less competent, less human, and less capable than over these last 10 months.

and other than the fact that i've just done in life what allan has done since we were 4 years old, i suppose that going to business school was my decision, and therefore all the attacks on who i am are thus my fault.

in fact, now that i think about it, the most successful i ever felt this year was eating an ungodly number of twinkies in front of 900 of the smartest, most successful people i've ever met. and taking down little debbie ho-hos, my friends, was not on any one of my six 5-hour each final exams.

2. the woman has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.

even though business school and i are breaking up for a year, it has become quite apparent to me that my education is everywhere. not only do i now understand more than just the classifieds section in the wall street journal, but also i have been known to run financial projections every time i sit down in a restaurant and have since estimated appropriate depreciation on the summer wardrobe i just purchased.

the good news is that this business mindedness has not consumed every facet of my life: i.e. the business ethics class is only selectively omnipresent. for instance, i didn't tell the woman at bed bath and beyond that she forgot to ring up one of the pillowcases i recently bought.

3. the woman has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere.

when it comes down to it, despite being surrounded by no less than 90 people for the vast majority of the last year, graduate school is a deeply lonely and painfully transformational experience. somewhere in between drinking the harvard kool-aid and the john harvards beer, between preparing for a cold call and primping for the cold weather, between growing up and going down, i forgot about tradeoffs.

i didn't realize that pledging to not be at the top of my class meant trading off the excitement of competition. i didn't realize that not consciously planning my long distance relationships meant trading off the relationship altogether. i didn't realize that casually hooking up with only super good-looking guys meant trading off the compassion one finds in a single meaningful connection.

in short, the last year has been all about tradeoffs: careers. academia. relationships. sex. apricots.

although the fact that i have yet to run out of things to bitch about (sometimes funny, mostly not; sometimes heart-warming, mostly not; but always sarcastic and bitter) after nearly two years might lead you to believe that i have identified prescriptions to that which plagues the twenty-nothing soul, loyal readers will assure you i don't. they might also vouch for my unparalleled ability to make my life way more fucked up than necessary.

but since leaving home at 18, after four years of college, two years of working, and a poor excuse for a year of business school, i can tell you this:

the hardest thing about growing up is taking risks -- in love, in jobs, in school, in maturity, in friendship, in sex, and in the lunchroom cafeteria -- knowing that there is always the real possibility that in just a moment, we could lose it all.

so sometimes, the best we can do is just close our eyes and jump. even if we don't always know how long it will require us to hold our breasts breaths.