On Self-Reassurance.

I'm a whale.

Seriously. All I need is the blowhole and barnacles stuck to my forehead.

Coming off a painful illness that rendered me incapable of anything but trench-crawling from the bed to the bathroom and back again, my mind has convinced my body that one week of inactivity has made me into a 300 pound wildebeest that needs its jaw wired shut, and pronto.

Essentially, I am any large mammal you can compare a fat person to.

With that in mind, I've been sweating (not to the oldies) for the last half hour on an elliptical, followed by an hour-long spin class. Today is a cardio day, and I'm facing the challenge like a possessed creature out to punish herself for having the audacity to become ill.

Ten minutes into spin, my phone buzzes with a Facebook notification from my school cohort group. In the alert, Ally is congratulating me and another classmate.

What the what?

I text her. One word.

"Huh?"

Ally replies that I need to check my school email. I do, and we have been sent a message telling us the winners of the awards given to three students for their capstone papers. The top winner is the other student she mentioned, an FBI agent who wrote about concealed information tests. Ally is the second winner, for her paper on intuition. The third winner is me.

The above incident happened two weeks ago. Just now I went back to the original email, which I have yet to delete even though it offers no pertinent information. Part of me wanted to reread it on the off chance that I somehow read it wrong, that it really said someone else and not me, or that it magically changed to another name.

Nope. Still me.

A few months ago, that research paper was little more than pages and pages of messily scribbled notes pieced together from books, articles, and one lone (though invaluable) interview. At the time, my addled brain was a jumble, as scattered as the crumpled papers strewn on my makeshift desk (my bed). The idea of putting it all together into an academic paper seemed laughable and downright impossible. This is when the doubt crept in.

What am I doing here?

There is almost no research on this topic. I am seriously insane. No, seriously.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Lolz how do I words?

Paradiddle paradiddle paradiddle paradiddle.

Alcohol, you're my best friend. Let's never break up.

Slowly but surely, the paper began to take form. Ideas were shifted into sequence, and my written sheets were chucked into the trash can one by one, as their contents were typed into a Word document. Finally, finally, two weeks after the due date, with some trepidation and a hell of a lot of self-doubt, I ran my fingers vertically, then horizontally across my laptop.

Vaya con Dios.

And I turned it in. It was not my best work, and far from the high expectations I had set up for myself when I began the research. But my brain was fried. I was exhausted, and at the very least, knew that I had managed an A. That was all I needed.

 My writing style (even in my paper) is not what you would call academic. My forum posts consist of a few paragraphs, short and to the point with as little extra window dressing sentences as possible. To that end I felt that someone else, someone far more erudite than I, would surely win, and deservedly so.

While I still think of myself as much less eloquent than some of my peers, I have accepted that I am apparently a decent enough writer to win shit. Who knew? 'The slacker who added a badly drawn Fancy Man to the end of her Research Methods paper (much to the non-amusement of the T.A.) is actually ok with research.

Indeed, you classy bastard, you.

The moral of the story? The whale/wildebeest/rhino/manatee may be such, but she can write.

Stranger things have happened.