First In A Four Part Series	I had no idea when I registered for the course on Sylvia Plath that it would lead to my breakdown that winter. It was the last course I needed to graduate and I was determined to graduate before I turned 30 years old. I sat at my ergonomically correct workstation in my non-descript gray cubicle at Conglomerate HealthCare scanning the university course listing. I had been taking two courses in the evening each semester at the state university for the last eight years. One upper division English course during the fall semester was all I needed to complete my bachelor degree and graduate in January. My finger stopped beneath the listing for the Plath course: "A study of the poetry and prose of Sylvia Plath from a literary, psychological, and sociological perspective taught by Professor Joyce Birdseye." I imagined a class full of black turtleneck wearing feminists raging against the social inequities that drove Plath to suicide.
I ignored the prerequisite, wrote the course number on my registration card and threw the card in my "out" bin to be mailed. Visions of Plath hunched over a typewriter in a freezing London flat entertained me for the rest of the afternoon as I mindlessly processed claim forms. The semester began as usual. I arrived home late from work and explained to my husband, Adam, that I had gone to three different stores to find the notebook and highlighters I wanted. "I’m very particular about my notebooks, you know that," I reminded him. "I’ve been using the same college ruled notebooks since I took that first creative writing class eight years ago. And I have to have pink highlights, not yellow. Yellow is jarring and hurts my eyes." Adam humored me, but he didn’t really understand. "Honey, you would get an A if you used a stone tablet and a chisel to take notes." Adam is the embodiment of the cliché that love is blind. He truly thought that everything I did was wonderful. I did have a perfect 4.0 grade point average and every semester the pressure to maintain it mounted. Any semester I could receive a B, (or even an A minus) ruining my average and negating all the work I had done the previous years. I wrote my name and the classroom location on the front of my notebook and stuffed it into the leather backpack that I had bought on our honeymoon in Paris last October. I changed into shorts and a Lilith Fair t-shirt in a dingy bathroom stall at work before driving to the university to attend the first class. I pulled my auburn hair back into a ponytail and slung my backpack over my shoulders. I smiled as I walked away from the mirror, pleased that in my casual clothes I would blend right in with the twenty-somethings on campus.
I parked my car in the commuter parking lot and walked across the familiar campus to my classroom. The sun was slipping from the sky but it was still warm out. I loved autumn. September had always signified a new beginning for me. As a child, unlike my friends, I looked forward to the start of the school year. I loved the smooth, cool surface of a brand new marble covered composition book. I would write so neatly in the book the first few times, listening for the clicking of the pen as it slid across the crisp paper. I still liked to lift the book up to my face and inhale the promising scent of the ink. I entered the Harrison Building and found my classroom. I took a seat in the middle of the small room and watched as it filled up with the usual assortment of evening students. Young girls with pierced bodies and tattoos, a few women my age and older, serious academic girls in long skirts and three boys who looked ill at ease amidst all the estrogen in the room.		Continue