Personal Venting

I almost didn't make it to Spanish class tonight.
Sitting in my car, lost, with tears streaming down my face, already late, I knew I was in no shape to face anyone. It seemed easier to send an impersonal text message to cancel class and then return home to sulk and eat too much ice cream.
For some reason, I pulled myself together and went to class anyway.
I'm glad I did.
16 months ago, 6 months ago, an intense Spanish class with past-perfect-subjunctive verb tenses would have only been an additional frustration on top of my day.
For some reason, successfully conjugating, conversing, and completing verbs and sentences in my adopted foreign language was just what I needed to remind me why I'm here.
Why I put up with all of the other little frustrations in the every day.
For some reason, today's frustrations - which were really no different than any other day's frustrations - lazy and demanding students, incompetent boss, backed-up-traffic, no electricity, switching cars, difficult homework, etc., were then compounded by some unusual events - david being out of town, grades due tomorrow, the police nearly pulling me over, a rude clerk, and getting lost - until I could no longer handle another crisis, no matter how minor. I did not think I could speak in Spanish.
How strange it was to find that my mind thought of Spanish as comforting, rather than confusing. It was like sitting down with a cup of hot chocolate and churros at the end of a long day.