How this all began

Hello all, it is time for everyone's absolute favorite post, the introduction "history" of the blog. Well, I would absolutely hate to disappoint so here we go:

Starting this fall, I am a student at University of Mary in their Doctoral program for Occupational Therapy.

Alright, now that that's out of the way, on to the story of how this happened. I graduated in 2015 with my bachelor's in Interdisciplinary Studies with an emphasis in Psychology and a minor in Biology (although I will often just say that I was a psych major since I basically was) at the age of 20.5 years old. When I was approaching graduation I had every intention of jumping right back into school after a short break and becoming an accomplished OT in the near future (I actually thought that I would be in my last year of OT school by now...). Unfortunately I did not account for some of the circumstances that might arise.

1. Mother (main support system) losing her job
2. Stolen laptop computer
3. Burnout
4. Move to a new state 
5. $$Money$$

Long story short, nothing happened in 2016 but stress followed by a 4-month long depression and beginning a new job. By 2017,  I was ready and turned in my applications... all 9 of them... costing me several hundred dollars (a topic for another post). Over the next several months every single school  that I had applied to had rejected me. I was devastated and considered giving up my dream of being an OT and finding some other field to enter. 

I decided to give it one more go and began building contingencies in case of failure (counseling, social work, OTA, etc.). I had just really begun my research into schools, plans for making a kick-butt OTCAS personal essay, and set up to observe an OT in an acute in-patient setting when I received an email from UMary asking if I would like to do a phone interview. I said yes.

That was one week ago today. 

Six days ago I had that awkward interview on the phone (because really, when are phone interviews not awkward) in a quiet storage room at work during my lunch break. I don't think I truly finished half of my sentences and left feeling both optimistic and doomed. I didn't want to hope that I could get in... and I wanted nothing more than to be accepted as UMary was the school that I had thought I would attend. The next morning, just before 6am, I received an email declaring that I had been accepted. first thing I did was tell my family and then my work family. They are all happy for me but none of them want to see me go, and I don't particularly want to leave. I just really want to do this.

For the last five days my life has taken a complete 180.

Now, of course, comes the process of finding a job as a CNA, finding an apartment in my strict and limited budget, acquiring furniture (as I own a nightstand) and necessities, and moving 15 3/4 hours away from home to start at the beginning of the rest of my life.