131 // now i live off mirrors and smoke
I don't understand how you're supposed to know at nearly 22 what you want to do with the rest of your life. Or how you're supposed to enter college at 18 with your life mapped out. It's a lie that you don't have to know, though they'll insist this is supposed to be a time of discovery for you. If you don't know the moment you step foot here, you miss out on every opportunity and you're left behind. But what's even more frightening is the thought of leaving with no more idea of what you want to do than when you arrived. And I'm starting to really fear that I'm dangerously close to that.
I'm graduating with a useless degree, and that's already frustrating. I have to supplement in all these classes and then go back to school to get another one that will actually be worth something, and no matter how I look at it, it feels like four wasted years. But now I'm even having second thoughts about that.
Going through Anatomy & Physiology right now is a trial by fire. This is the most basic, foundational information I will need, and it is unbelievably overwhelming and demanding. Not only that, but I'm having a lot of trouble bringing myself to look nonchalantly at wounds and sutures and watching people get stitched up or looking at surgeries... I look around the class during lectures and no one else is looking away. Some are really fascinated by it. And I try to force myself to watch, because this will have to be routine one day. But all I can do is sit there and think about the pain that person must be feeling, or must have felt when they were injured, and I can't watch them get stitched up because it feels like a violation. Which is completely backwards - it's saving a life.
And I still think about laying there in the hospital and everything that made me want to be a nurse in the first place, and all that aspect is still really exciting and appealing to me. And I think, having spent so much time as a patient and having gone through some scary experiences as one gives me a unique perspective. An understanding. I still want desperately to take care of people. But I can hardly do that if I cannot bear to look on their injuries. And I try to reason with myself that I won't necessarily have to work in a department where I deal with something like this -- I want to work in hematology/oncology, the department I was under as a patient -- but reasonably, anything can happen anywhere.
In addition to that, going through the labs and trying to memorize all of this science is just making it painfully obvious to me that my brain is not wired this way. I chose to major in English for a reason. My skills are in the creative fields. My passions are there. I get excited when I write a poem, or when I spend hours putting together the newspaper's layout, or when I can just stare at a piece of art and try to find every small detail and wonder at it. And as magnificent a creation as the human body is, I don't feel the same way when I study it. And I'm wondering if maybe I should have done psychology after all, or neuroscience, or something that excites me like that. English is worthless because I don't want to be a teacher and I don't think I could be, and the thought of entering the business world horrifies me a hundred times more than watching someone get stitched, and publishing is too competitive and unstable. And I am not naive enough to consider writing full time an option, though that will forever be my quiet dream.
To be really honest, it's more than that. It's a desperate wish. Because there is nothing that I am more passionate about, nothing I enjoy more. Writing is...I can't describe the experience. When it's real, it's like being in a separate world altogether.
I don't know. I'm just overwhelmed with this right now, and nothing seems to fit anywhere or feel right. I just sort of...broke down a little tonight. And that's frustrating too because I really don't think that I can do another semester in full blown depression. The only reason I made it through last one was because of Dellynne, and about three and a half months of summer to recover afterward. "Recover." Actually it just brought up even more shit, now that I think about it, but that's neither here nor there. Now I am alone here and I cannot deal with this right now. I need my head functioning, and I can't afford the exhaustion or the lethargy. We'll not go into the emotional train wreckages that can be a night inside a damaged mind.
I wish I didn't have to grow up.