Clipping A Night Owl's Wings

 I have adrenal fatigue.

What does this mean? I means that my life as a person who stays up till 2:00 am working on homework is over for now (except on the rare occasion when I have a paper due and even then I usually only get to 1:00 before I'm dead). It means that unless I get at least 9 hours of sleep, I'm dead. It means I take lots of naps. It also means that there are times when I have to skip school or church or work because I just can't get out of bed .

But what is adrenal fatigue? I think I've written about it before, but here is a nice handy definition :

"Adrenal fatigue is a collection of signs and symptoms, known as a syndrome that results when the adrenal glands function below the necessary level. Most commonly associated with intense or prolonged stress, it can also arise during or after acute or chronic infections, especially respiratory infections such as influenza, bronchitis or pneumonia" (http://www.adrenalfatigue.org/what-is-adrenal-fatigue). 

Some time my senior year, I managed to over tax my adrenal glands and they decided to go on strike. So, now, they don't work properly. They don't give me energy like normal people's do. When they aren't working it's not just normal tiredness. Although, most of the time it isn't so bad, last summer I basically had no energy at all and I lay in bed most of the day watching youtube videos. I've gotten better since then and I am able to function normally most of the time, when I get a good nights sleep. But when it's at its worst it feels like I'm trapped in my body. It takes every strength of will to keep moving and not collapse. The only thing that have way keeps me functional is lots of caffeine. I went from drinking at most 24 oz of Pepsi a week and the occasional cup of coffee or tea to drinking one of the bottles every day I can't manage to get a couple hours nap, along with coffee and sometimes several cups of tea. Even then, I still feel tired.

Unfortunately, things like staying up to late, having lots of stress, waking up too early, taking part in lots of physical exertion, all deplete your adrenals. So basically, as a college student, I'm screwed. And because of this, here I sit, at 4:30 in the morning, unable to get to sleep for some unknown reason even though I am exhausted. I'm worried about how I am going to make it through tomorrow and the last few days of school when my body was barely functioning already and now I have gone almost an entire night without sleep. Wondering what I'm going to have to miss, or what homework I'm going to have to let slip through the cracks just so I can get enough sleep to be able to function.

So yup. That is my life right now. I've been struggling with trying to go to bed early when I am naturally disposed to staying up as late as possible, and trying to manage to work and go to school. It's been kinda hard. Especially when I've been so busy that I have to stay up late working on homework and studying for tests. But things are getting better. I just have to be careful about how much I do. Try not to over book myself. It can take up to two years to recover from adrenal fatigue if you get enough sleep, reduce your stress, take lost of vitamin C, drink salt water, and some other random things, but it does get better. I hope. I just have to be patient and trust God, because He knows what he's doing. Hopefully, it will get better soon.

~Nat

27 Room Keys

Well, it's actually only ten...But I thought that "10 Room Keys" wasn't as nice a sounding title. Plus there is that little tie in to the movie which gives a sense of recognizability and pulls people in. And I'm the writer so I can do what I want. So don't criticize me!

 Even if there aren't quite 27, these ten room keys are still impressive. You see, they each represent a hotel that I stayed at during my speech tournaments (by the way...I would appreciate if you didn't tell the hotel that I stole their keys...). Each one represents a different story in the journey that was my first year of college forensics. I will not be telling you all of their stories because that would take too long, I'm tired, and plus I don't exactly remember them all. Remember, I'm the writer. I can do what I want. But, I will tell you a general overview of my whole speech year, because that is much simpler.

Before I get into my story about this past year of speech, I'm sure you all want to know how nationals went. I didn't end up getting to out of prelim rounds in any of my speeches, but many of my teammates did and they did an amazing job! Because of the great job they did, and the points the rest of us got in prelims, UNO got 5th in the nation for the second year in a row. Which, considering our team is significantly smaller and has significantly less funding then any of the other teams that got in the top ten, is pretty amazing.

Now, back to my story.

I started out speech, not quite sure how things were going to work out. I loved speech in high school, but this was a whole new cup of tea. I had a lot to learn about how they did it in college and at first it was kind of hard. I had particular difficulty with the monster know as extemp. To those of you who don't know what that is and want to find out click on the smiley: :); to those of you who don't know and don't want to bother to find out, just know, it is very time consuming; to those of you who do know, you know what I'm talking about. It was very discouraging for me because it was so time consuming. I just didn't have the time to do as well at it as I wanted to and for a perfectionist who is upset that she's getting a B+ in history class (darn you history teacher! Why can't we have some more extra credit?), not being able do the best I could drove me nuts. Once I got more used to the activity, I found it easier to make better use of the time I had and it started to feel more comfortable. Now I like extemp; which is a good things since I am banned from ever quitting since apparently it shows a person is good when they get to finals at a state tournament in extemp as a freshman.

The story of extemp essentially applies to how the rest of my speech experience went: I wasn't comfortable, I found it hard and so I didn't enjoy it as much at first. As time when on though, I grew to love it and am now even more addicted to speech than I was in high school. I fell in love with it all over again and I am going to be sad when I have to leave it. Even more than that, I fell in love with my team. I knew from my first meeting when I was auditioning for the team that they were special and I felt for some reason that I belonged with them and I do. All of the people I have met are amazing and are some of the most special people in the world. I am so excited for more years to get to know them all.

And that is basically it with my story. I learned to love speech again and I found some amazing new friends. I'm really glad God brought me to UNO. I'm excited to see what next year brings. I'm sure it will include a lot more good stories and definitely many more hotel room keys.

And now I should probably get back to writing my English paper....

~Nat