Update on what I'm doing before my trip

I've been holding out on you a bit. I should probably tell you what's been happening since I last wrote to you:

• I went to Sydney with my sister to see the Lion King stage show. It was awesome
• Had Christmas. Also good, but I needed the next day to recover
• I cleaned 80% of my room, then did the other 20% when I got back from Sydney, and now it's kind of messy again from all my packing. Piles of clothes are all over the living room
• I caught up with friends (Chocolate and friends is always a good mix)

Right now I should be either packing or sleeping but I wanted to write.

After my going away party I was in a great mood. The next day all I had left to do, mixed with a lack of sleep, left me feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

It's hard to stop myself from fretting over things. Mostly things will work out. I told myself that but it didn't help. I think I just need to accept that things are stressful sometimes, and try to focus on the present.

Most of the time what is happening right this second isn't stressful, it's the past or future that we stress over. Sometimes that stress is good--for example, to finally kick my butt into gear and load my travel card. But other times there are things outside our control. I tried to disassociate from my thoughts by thinking, 'In a year, will this matter?' That didn't help. Only time helped.

I'm also working on not taking my frustrations out on other people. That's hard. When I'm in that sort of mood I really need to go somewhere isolated until it passes, then do yoga or read or do something while I'm waiting for the negative thoughts to pass. Right now that's impossible with so much to do, but the worst is over. A good night's sleep will probably fix me up.

I decided not to get a credit card in the end. Just so that I'm not in too much debt. But the OS Help loan-- a $6G loan that gets added to HECS interest free--hasn't been approved by the government yet (freaked me out coz I thought that loan was a done thing). If that doesn't go ahead I'll have to live extremely tightly and probably won't be able to do any travelling around, and I'd probably come back with nothing. So here's hoping.