My lucky day

I need to buy a lottery ticket today. Or maybe just go ask people on the street for money, since it seems to be more my powers of persuasion rather than my luck that's been working overtime. This morning I received a notification that I've been awarded a substantial fellowship which will pay for 2 months interning at the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha, South Africa, as well as a semester interning at the MSU Museum, learning to curate. Then, this afternoon, I got another email telling me that my department is providing funds for me to travel to St. Louis for a conference in April. I had applied for both of these things, but honestly, when I submitted those letters, I didn't expect to receive either. So to get both in one day - !!! - well, honestly, it's wonderful.
I really do lead a charmed life - so I also try to live up to it.

Is it a breakthrough? Not yet...

... but I think I might be getting somewhere on my dissertation proposal. After weeks of agonizing anxiety over my apparently insurmountable methodological issues on establishing chronological control, I just sat my ass down and forced myself to read over my proposal draft and the comments my prof had made on it. This is a scary, SCARY thing, to confront such a highly imperfect representation of your self-made aspirations, the tangible measure of your self-worth as a blossoming academic, the sum of your educational background, the bar for your future career. It's so scary that every time I looked at the 10-page document this past month, I said to myself, "Nahhhhh.... I can't right now. I'll tackle it soon, just not now."
My proposal matters much more to me than to anyone else; it's the same with any student whose thesis looms in the near future. This is partly why I am so scared of it: because how can I convince anyone else that they should care enough to lend me some advice or assistance (or god forbid, funding)?
But, having run out of excuses, I did it today, and (as happened before, and will happen again) on reading through it, I realized it's not so bad, and even got a bunch more ideas on how to get at what I am trying to analyze. More to the point, I thought of how to break down the problem I want to research into its different bits and am forming a plan for how to tackle them one at a time.
The first and most important step in my plan is remembering to breathe.