Nothing Else & Anything Else
I go through my days where I will smile and smile and smile and laugh.
Then I go through my days where I admit that those smiles and times I've laughed were forced.
My miserable hometown, exacerbated my misery, and I moved. I'm out of there.
I come here, my current place of residence - a bed, 1/2 a bathroom, a desk and 1/4 kitchen in small room of a high-density apartment complex on a univeristy campus located off the northern california coast, on the edge of a redwood forest - and mess up the good things I've got going.
I fail my first semester of university - why? Because of laziness? Because of homesickness? Recklessness? Depression? I don't know what happen really, but it kepted me in bed during classes and inundated with emotions; confusion and fustrastion pouring out of me - literally, as I would cry in between classes and after, in the middle of the night and before I had lunch, and I would smoke some marijuana and down a class of whatever liqour I had on me at the time in between.
That's when I noticed something was really wrong. I like weed and booze. I enjoy it. It's always been my personal philosophy that I'd only alter my reality as an enlightening or "fun" thing to do. I've been always told people, if you're smoking or drinking to escape reality, then something clearly isn't right.
I went to see a counselor and we talked.I didn't know where to start because I don't get to talk often, conditioned to keep it brief by the short-attention span of people I consider friend, but I got the hang of it eventually. I think I started giving her so much at once. I was like a volcano and my words magma - coming from deep inside me and spout out by the built up pressure.
She asked me once, "Do you you want to be in school?"
I replied without thought, "I can't see myself doing anything else. I really do love it."
She said, "OK, that's something. Figuring out what you want to do is as important as doing it."
I just shook my head in agreement and she changed the subject.
In the beginning of the semester, because I am on Academic Probation - something totally foreign and scary to me - I was obligated to see an Academic Advisor/Tutor/Life Coach/Crazy Lady.
In my first meeting with her, she asked me, "Do you want to be a college student right now?" and this time, I hesitated for the slightest of seconds before saying, "Yeah I do." She replied, "are you sure, because you don't have to be."
That conversation struck me hard and I'm not exactly sure how I replied to that, if at all (ok, I did reply and it was something to the effect of "i really like this school, its facilities, the instructors..."), but I made the differentiation between what my counselor had asked and what my advisor had asked immediately.
I do want to be a college student, and I do like my school and new city. I love or can love the life I've made or am making here. I just don't know if academia is for me, right now. Although I can't see myself doing anything else, right now, I know that there is something else. I know that there are other things to pursue, that may not be/aren't as equally appealing, but alluring in their own sense, maybe easier than this route and it's bothering me.
Nothing else but school makes me feel happy [excited, mostly] and sad at the same time, and anything else terrifies me. School is the only thing that has been constant in my life, the one thing I thought I could stick with, 'cause I often give-up a lot [writing, people, etc.], and I don't know if I could let it go. Change comes with "anything else".
I know I'm not the first to say I'm afraid of change and all the implications that'll come with it.
xo
Nov
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