I can’t deny my romantic tendencies. I am actually thrilled to be taking a year to myself next year, so that I can indulge myself by reading whatever the hell I want and spending time staring out the window and thinking. My plans also include a lot of trekking through nature and on walking bridges over rivers. As much as I want to be involved in an academic life, I’m on academic overload as it is, and I need to take some time off from what is required of me. I’ll have a job and whatnot (at this point the job itself is not clear to me) but I want to spend a year floating, with no apparent responsibilities that weigh on the rest of my life with their urgency and importance. I don’t care if I end up being a secretary or a waitress or working some other inconsequential job, but I just want to have a life which can be light and free for a little while, until I have to get back to getting on with the rest of my life. The thought of picking a school and a specialization and having it affect the entire rest of my life is frankly terrifying. There is a part of me that wants nothing to do with a life where you constantly have to prove yourself as worthy of attention and respect. Part of me wants to do something which would be equally as fulfilling and challenging but without the pressure of proving myself to anyone. I’ve never been very good at the politics game, and my personality and feelings are very plain for anyone to see. People used to value this honesty in me, but those people liked me, and they appreciated by translucency. Now, I think it is something I hate, because in the real world, everything is fake and everyone has to pretend to be something they’re not in order to succeed. For some people, this works out because they’re genius and everyone respects them anyway, or they’ve always been the kind of person who can fake personality and emotion in order to get along wherever they are. I’ve never been this kind of person, and sacrificing my frankness for political salience is not my strong suit. In fact, I hate it, so I end up hating myself in some ways for being so honest about how I feel all the time. I hate personal facades. So the thought of having to put one on for the rest of life sounds exhausting. Maybe for a year I can feel somewhat free with myself and feel like I have no one to impress. That would be so refreshing.
My honesty is so debilitating. The last time I tried to be completely honest with someone and bear my messy soul to him, the gesture turned around and bit me in the ass. Last night I wrote a letter which was tempered by the time that I didn’t feel I had to be someone different in order to make him love me. I don’t think I’m going to send it; it was merely an exercise in self-expression which I think is some of the most beautiful and passionate prose (dare I say honest) I have written in a long time. The time that I could be in solitude from him without the pressures that accompanied his presence really allowed me to heal and to think in a way that I don’t think I would’ve been able to otherwise.
Not even to mention the crisis of academic writing that I am having at this time. I think the reason why I loved fall semester of my junior year so much and the reason why I found the work I was doing to be so fulfilling was that it felt like I was doing something groundbreaking and important (not that it really was, but hey, a girl can dream). Epiphanies abounded, and my writing was pretty good. Dr. H insists that the reason why I don’t feel this way anymore is because I am reaching maturity as a student; I am becoming more of a teacher rather than a student. But I’m not so sure. Part of the joy of writing some things in those days was that I felt like it was a part of me. That I was writing this academic paper for myself. I wrote one of those this semester about evangelical feminism and whether or not the Bible completely fucks women over, and it turns out that I lost sight of my audience and it was probably an ok paper. But the thought that passion has to be subordinated (or something) really is kinda blah. Maybe it’s because I haven’t found something in literature yet that I can latch onto with complete passion AND write good papers about. But in the end, if academe makes me retreat into myself and my own solitude (as Willa Cather so depressingly yet weirdly satisfiedly pointed out to me in The Professor’s House) then I’d like to be in love with my subject and have some passion about it.
And yet. I read all these blogs from academic people who basically go through the same shit over and over again, blog after blog, and none of it really sounds appealing, because they talk about parts of them dying and whatnot, and that sounds really scary. Plus most of them are hopeless at friendships and relationships and yet they keep doing the academic thing and they don’t know why. It’s almost like I can see where my life is headed and I have no fucking clue why I would want to do all of that to myself and yet I keep heading straight for the abyss. The abyss mostly involves eternal insecurity, loneliness and losing parts of my being. There are romantic reasons for getting involved, and yet the academic part of it is supposed to squash all of that out of existence. Damn, damn, damn! I don’t know what else to do with my life, so this seems to be the clearest road. Plus, I’m already a hopeless social retard, so I might as well enter the life that fits. The only other one seems to involve building a hut on Walden Pond and hoping that I don’t find that I have not lived.
