“You are a writer. Write.”

That’s what my therapist told me in July, right before we left Omaha for Phoenix.

So that’s what I’m doing. Follow along:

---

As I prepare to head back to school next week with a full semester of classes while trying to balance a full-time job, I figured it would be good for me to keep a running diary of my thoughts and meanderings. Very little of this will be organized or coherent, but I’m hopeful that this can be another accountability mechanism of sorts.

Over the last four years, I’ve been very lucky to enjoy a lot of professional success – as a journalist and then as a political consultant. Academic success, however, has eluded me for quite some time.

I have concluded that my biggest challenge is that I suffer from a lack of good work ethic and simply have not built the resilience needed to pull this off. However, I know how necessary this degree is in order for me to have the kind of career I want – one outside of politics, focused on stuff that actually matters.

In some ways, this feels like a do-or-die moment for me – if I don’t finish this degree now, it feels like the door on a career outside of politics would be closing. That alone feels like enough to light a fire under my [redacted] and get me to power through.

There are a LOT of hurdles that I need to overcome in order to pull this off. Building the grit needed to survive is one, but I’m also keeping my full-time job that is demanding and draining in nearly every way – mostly because Phoenix is not cheap and it won’t be getting any cheaper under the incoming administration.

I love the people I work with – few people can say they get to work with some of their closest friends and actually enjoy it. But fundraising, despite its promise of financial success, is not a fun gig, and it doesn’t feel particularly good either to be kowtowing to wealthy people to fund a political system that should be working for the rest of us, not for them.

Balancing the workload of this full-time job as well as this full semester of classes is going to be tricky, no doubt. Calendars and discipline will be integral here, and that’s always been a weak point for me. That said, I’m very lucky that my fiancée has already been through this process and so have all of my friends… in that sense, there is a benefit to being a late bloomer academically.

Oh, speaking of which… I’m planning a wedding too. Now that is a triple whammy of epic proportions. I’m definitely looking forward to that and have been enjoying the process, but I’d be lying if I said it was nothing to worry about. With the wedding being in Kansas City and us living in Phoenix, plus our respective workloads, it’s easy to see how things can fall behind if we’re not careful.

For now, though, I’m very lucky that I’ve got a great support system in place. And I’ve finally come to a point in my life where I’m able to take things one day at a time without turning into a complete ball of anxiety. Hopefully that will help.

I don’t know how much of this is coherent or structured or meaningful to anyone else. It certainly helped me to word-vomit this stuff out. We’ll see whether I do this again.

-A