No, but what I mean is that I sort of throw these feelings and words up onto a Web site, semi-anonymously, and then feel alternately ashamed and embarrassed and frightened and proud of them, and then I just avoid them for awhile. I flirt with the idea of starting a brand new diary, a tabula rasa, and even go so far as to pay the Gold Member fee for a brand new site that I've never even used. Because when faced with the decision of starting from scratch, reinventing myself, shedding the old me and starting fresh, I decide that the old me isn't such a bad me after all, despite all the self-loathing I've been doing lately. (And trust me, there's been a lot of it.)

So instead, I'm back. It's the day before Thanksgiving. The past three weeks (not to mention the past year) have been absolute hell. I have officially overextended myself this year, and while I have a lot to show for it, I am flat-out exhausted. And now, all I want to do is lie on my sofa in front of my fake fire, dozing to the sound of my husband playing video games, and just release.

This day has reminded me of my college years a lot. I went to a university that was on the quarter system. We were a state school, and the college gave students six weeks off between Thanksgiving and New Year's so people could work, because so many of us were funding our own education. The day before Thanksgiving was always the day that final exams were winding down. Typically, I hadn't slept a lot in the past few days, and when I emerged from my last test at 10 in the morning, squinting against the firey fall sunlight, I had this powerful, emotional sense of just letting go. Every nerve in my body felt it. And I'd sort of wander around campus for awhile, in a daze, my body feeling so spent and yet my heart so full. Knowing that everything was over, that I had six weeks of healing before I had to start everything all over again.