Wednesday, January 26, 2005
I told you I wasn't finished going insane
The way I've felt all month long, I could be back in last September again. What is going on?
To begin with, I started out the month saying goodbye to Luke again. That tore me up for a couple of days. But his visit made me think of the big picture again for the first time in ages. The rest of my life still exists. I am not on vacation. I like to think I understood that before just now. But I can't be sure.
This month I've felt more lonely than I did when I first moved here. Nobody I knew was in town. There were no classes to go to. Nowhere to go on a regular basis. I wasn't drinking, which wasn't hard itself, but the activity of going down to the gay bar was a completely different experience. To clarify, it was one that involved little to no fun. A night out felt like an eternity and I suddenly felt incredibly foolish for spending so much of my time in a state of inebriation over the last several months. But it's not like I regret it -- I had great times with my great friends and never put myself in danger (except for the once), but for some reason everything is different now.
During one of my 11-hour essay-writing marathons last November, I realized that maybe I've made a huge mistake going to university. I think I wrote about it on this blog, actually. Last semester, I was taking classes totally irrelevant to my degree. I laughed in the face of my academic responsibilities because I felt so confident I would do well when it came to my own turf, but the new semester starts next week and now I'm starting to remember what it was like back home to feel like an imposter in your own department because what you can't do is precisely what you're expected to.
Between me and my degree is a semester of classes here and quarter of classes back home. Oh, and an honors thesis. Who knows if I'm capable of doing any of that? What happens if I do get a degree? Where does it get me? WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO GO? WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?
So those are a few of the questions hanging out in the foreground of my mind lately.
Maybe this is a case of "there's nothing too do and I'm going stir crazy spending so much time in my own head." When I spend this much time by myself and there's nothing I'm strictly supposed to be doing, I remember that it's up to me to use this time to write. Unfinished stories, essays, screenplays, whatever. This kind of free time is a luxury I won't enjoy for long. But I sit down to write and nothing comes out. There are too many distractions to write anything. There are not enough distractions to drag me out of this funk. (Not the Chaka Kahn kind of funk, either.) I feel so alone, but being around people is so hard.
Well, that's all for today! I hope you've all learned a valuable lesson from all this: racism is bad! Why do you look so confused? Are you saying racism isn't bad? And I thought I was crazy.
To begin with, I started out the month saying goodbye to Luke again. That tore me up for a couple of days. But his visit made me think of the big picture again for the first time in ages. The rest of my life still exists. I am not on vacation. I like to think I understood that before just now. But I can't be sure.
This month I've felt more lonely than I did when I first moved here. Nobody I knew was in town. There were no classes to go to. Nowhere to go on a regular basis. I wasn't drinking, which wasn't hard itself, but the activity of going down to the gay bar was a completely different experience. To clarify, it was one that involved little to no fun. A night out felt like an eternity and I suddenly felt incredibly foolish for spending so much of my time in a state of inebriation over the last several months. But it's not like I regret it -- I had great times with my great friends and never put myself in danger (except for the once), but for some reason everything is different now.
During one of my 11-hour essay-writing marathons last November, I realized that maybe I've made a huge mistake going to university. I think I wrote about it on this blog, actually. Last semester, I was taking classes totally irrelevant to my degree. I laughed in the face of my academic responsibilities because I felt so confident I would do well when it came to my own turf, but the new semester starts next week and now I'm starting to remember what it was like back home to feel like an imposter in your own department because what you can't do is precisely what you're expected to.
Between me and my degree is a semester of classes here and quarter of classes back home. Oh, and an honors thesis. Who knows if I'm capable of doing any of that? What happens if I do get a degree? Where does it get me? WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO GO? WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?
So those are a few of the questions hanging out in the foreground of my mind lately.
Maybe this is a case of "there's nothing too do and I'm going stir crazy spending so much time in my own head." When I spend this much time by myself and there's nothing I'm strictly supposed to be doing, I remember that it's up to me to use this time to write. Unfinished stories, essays, screenplays, whatever. This kind of free time is a luxury I won't enjoy for long. But I sit down to write and nothing comes out. There are too many distractions to write anything. There are not enough distractions to drag me out of this funk. (Not the Chaka Kahn kind of funk, either.) I feel so alone, but being around people is so hard.
Well, that's all for today! I hope you've all learned a valuable lesson from all this: racism is bad! Why do you look so confused? Are you saying racism isn't bad? And I thought I was crazy.
