My hands feel like numb barnacles that just rose to the surface in a tide pool. Moist. Clamy. Yuck, that is exactly how they feel after typing for three hours at a time. The circular motion of my blood reaching every extremity of my finger tips is reassuring, as I am aware that I still have blood flow there. Congrats to my circulatory system.

You've done well today. As my eyes begin to sweat one last drop, it becomes much more visible that I finally turned in my graduate school applications. They are done. They are over with. Complete. After 8 months of refining the sentence structure of each and every paragraph, I now know that I won't have to worry about them anymore. So to everyone who just turned in their graduate school, law school, or medical school applications:

No more biting your nails down their buds.

Do you remember the days you would bite or pick your nails so far down you could barely see them, they are long gone. You turned in your application. There is no need to bit them anymore until you get in graduate school and are worried about financially supporting yourself.

No more telling yourself you will not get your application in on time.

Because you already got it in silly goose! Let's make the assumption that if your application was able to go through, you did submit it in time. So congrats!

No more having nightmares about getting all the paperwork done in time for the application to be in.

Again, your application is already in. Congrats.

You can't change the fate of your application now.

You already submitted it.

Now, all you can do is wait.

Wait to hear back from the admin board. Wait to hear back from the financial aid committee. These choices are currently out of your control. So while it makes sense to be concerned about your fate, there is nothing you can do to change the process because the process is already happening.

Continue to focus on your grades if you are still in school.

You want to maintain that GPA and make sure that after the school accepts you as a candidate, they still want you.

Hold your head up high.

Because you don't want to end up with a hunched neck.

Keep breathing.

Because you don't have an answer yet.

And whatever the fate of your application is, don't give up.

Because you will get in to graduate school.