There are days where I find it hard to write, usually because my brain is throwing itself in a million directions. Today is one of those days.

It’s been nearly 6 years since I graduated with my undergraduate degree, and this morning, I found myself taking the bus back to campus. Even though this time around, I’m here to work, I was still on that bus, backpack in hand, headphones in my ears, surrounded with students on the 7:20 express to the first day of their educational lives.

I had a teeny tiny panic attack.

It wasn’t so much the bus ride, even though those can get pretty hairy on a Monday morning when it’s done nothing but rain ice for the last six hours. It felt more like a collapsing of years: I was, suddenly, simultaneously 17 and 28, worried both about surviving my first 8am lecture and doing the math on what time I need to go to bed in order to work Job #1 the next day. I existed, for a moment, somewhere between the two, feeling like I hadn’t studied for a test and contemplating my RRSP, and needed to take half an hour’s worth of very deep, careful breaths.

I consider myself lucky, in a lot of ways – I’m a generally anxious person, prone to thinking over absolutely everything well past it’s limits, but for the most part, that deep thought has served me well. It guided my academic career, it gives me a unique perspective when I write sketches and do improv, and for the most part, it makes me deeply funny at the most inopportune but critically necessary times. It’s strange to think that, possibly, somewhere, there is a parallel universe version of myself that feels confident, stress free, and has no problem falling asleep on a bus back to where her life started.

I bet she drinks tea on the bus without spilling, too. Nothing like starting the day off with a tilty brain and wet socks.