Bridge to a Mental Breakdown

I've been feeling a little bit emotional lately. First, most of it is the sheer terror of my impending grownup hood and the fact that I'm leaving my socialable supported life in Madison behind in favor of a two bedroom apartment in a strange new land with no one to watch the Bachelor with me. Secondly, I'm also horribly short on sleep and when I don't sleep enough, that's when you can expect me to break out in a sob or two at any given moment. And, finally, I'm the kind of person who needs to have a good weep every now and again to remain stable. I haven't had a weep in a while because I'm trying reallyhard *insert jaw clenching here* to keep it all together until at least next week. So I'm kind of a mess...

This creates issues because I still have to function and that's just not happening. For instance, I need to be writing a paper about intellectual freedom for my young adult literature course. I need to read a book that's been banned, come up with a fake scenario in which I was working at a library and said book was challenged, write a speech that I would present to the committee making the decision about the challenge, create an annotated bibliography of the sources I used to support the book and also a list of resources I could turn to in case I do have a book challenged at my library some day. This is due tomorrow (and yet, here I am type type typing away on my blog!) and I think my emotional state of mind is really fucking with my ability to function academically.

Here's the problem: the book that I'm defending is Bridge to Terabithia. Now, I loved this book, absolutely loved it. I won't ruin it for you if you haven't read it but I will say this, if you are feeling kind of overly emotional (as I am) this is not the book to read. I was reading in the SLIS library, blinking back tears, swallowing the lump in my throat and trying to keep it together, fearing that if I actually let the tears tumble down my cheeks, they just wouldn't stop.

Here's the bigger problem: I'm now trying to defend this book that I loved and that made me really sad and yet happy and hopeful etc etc etc. This means I'm dwelling a lot on this book. I'm reading reviews of it, articles about it, reading passages from it and now I'm writing a heartfelt, passionate, inspiring speech pleading rationally and well supportedly (god the grammar) to keep this book on the shelves. And I'm tearing up every five seconds, particularly when I start to think about if this book would happen to be challenged in my library and if I had to stand up in front of the community that pays my bills and defend this perfect, lovely book. That's when the tears really start to well. Hell, I'm even getting emotional writing this stupid entry.

Honestly, I'm tempted to watch Dead Poets Society or another depressing movie that I would have in my movie collection and have a good cry and get it out of my system. Shit, never mind. All of my movies are already packed. Sigh.