Rock vs Hard Place

The semester started back up today which marks exactly a year since I started my grad school work, and to be honest, I just realized that as I was typing this sentence.
It doesn't feel like a year.  I feels like three.
I started the semester off right by turning off my cell phone on the way home from class.  My class ends just as rush hour begins so I'll always have a solid 1.5 hours to contemplate life on the way home.
Contemplating life is hard work kids.

One year ago, I felt like I had life pretty much figured out.  I had just quit my job. I was going to the school I wanted to go to.  I was so much happier. And since I was so much happier, I think my family was too.

But today as I drove home, I wanted to cry. I wanted someone to curl up with that would UNDERSTAND.

I had gone over to school early in the hopes of catching three different professors, so I could have various and sundry chats with them.  One of them I just had a simple question for.  He wasn't in the office, he was in a meeting.  I had lots of personal questions for another one of them.  She was eating a late lunch with another professor in her office.  The third I was going to crawl into his office with my tail between my legs and explain WHY I was taking a course outside my degree plan and hope that he didn't blackball me for the rest of my life.  I'm not sure he was here today.

I know that part of today's emotional stress was needing to have conversations with lots of people and not getting to talk to any of them, and so the conversations continue to swirl around in my head until I have class again, and I can try to catch them again.

But it's not just the conversations that are swirling around.  I have decisions to make based off of those conversations. And oh my heavens, the decisions, they are killing me.  Some of the decisions are simple and some of them are life altering (in my current perspective).

I have this feeling that I won't be able to have a simple conversation with any of these professors, because I just want to know what they think, I want them to tell me all about their own experiences and direct me to the right path.  I want to know that getting a PhD won't kill my family or that adding to the family won't kill my career.  I want to know that other people have done what I'm doing. And I really want to know what I made on my Shakespeare paper.

But driving home today I felt like no matter who I talked to I was going to get an answer I didn't want and then I was going to have to make either a smart/safe decision or a gutsy/stupid decision.  But I feel that whether the decisions I make are gutsy or safe, they are still going to be wrong.

And I hate being wrong.