white noise
My head has not been clear for several weeks. Even over break, when I was trying to relax, there were always a million thoughts going through at once. Everything ranging from "you should really start getting this work done" to "how can you feel so lonely when you've been spending so much time with people?" to "maybe you should stop thinking in the 2nd person all the time". Even tonight, when I told myself I would sit down and finish up this work on my pchem lab report so the burden can finally be lifted, all I could hear was the white noise, all of the thoughts pouring back it at once; the hopes and the insecurities, the memories and the mistakes.
Once I started reliving the memory of my grandmother's hospital visit over the summer, I totally froze up and wasn't able to concentrate anymore. I don't know exactly what it was about thinking about it -- obviously my grandmother is back in good health -- but just something totally caught me off-guard and started the entire normal chain reaction going on in my head.
I'm already doing poorly in school... if something were to happen to them... I'd fall apart. I'd have to take at least a semester off, and I'd have to go back home, and I'd work full-time doing something, and I'd go back to school when I was ready, mentally, regardless of whether I had the capacity of knowledge to do so. Which leads to "would that really be so bad? isn't that more what your family's history says you're suited for anyway?"
Don't get me wrong: I really appreciated the sorts of things that I heard from Mike and Naila on my last post, and I really only get this way in spurts. Deep down, I know full well I belong at Yale, I know that I shouldn't believe that I should have settled for less than my expectations. But when my focus continues to be lost so terribly, when I have no idea of what direction I want to take my life, when other juniors are already planning every aspect of their senior years and I don't even know fully what I should take next semester, when the freshmen I know are able to do so much better in the same courses that I'm taking... I just feel mediocre, remedial, lost. I know the problem is 100% on my shoulders, that I'm just not devoted enough, not motivated enough, not meticulous enough in my studies. What I don't know is how to fix that without feeling so much worse about myself.
I already truly miss the people around me at college. Ever since getting back to Yale from Thanksgiving break, I've felt like my own desert island. I see my friends every so often, either over meals or [infrequently since I never really went, and now irrelevant since they're over now] in classes, but it doesn't feel like the connection is the same. Anyone who knows me well knows that I often live for my friends -- for better or for worse -- and would do anything for them. It makes me feel a little empty knowing that I've been neglecting them while I've been spiraling in my own personal hell hole.
Part of me wants to enter into a schedule like my friend Erin has at East Carolina -- wake at 5:30, take care of things around the room until 7 or so, study and do work until classes start, attend each one, eat along the way somewhere, come back, do more work, do more studying, eat dinner, do whatever errands there are in the evening (flute for her, CA work for me, I suppose), and go to sleep around 10. I feel like it would be healthy for me, especially since my health is often something I have to neglect. Of course, you'll note this leaves no time for socializing -- I'd pretty much just become a hermit.
Would that really be so bad? Or so different from how it is now? Often I feel like a burden on my friends, so many silly issues of my own, saying how I can't handle my load when others' aren't any lighter, always seeking advice for the most meaningless bullshit. In fact, that's half the reason I wanted to get rid of my other LJ name -- besides the fact that the username kinda sucked, it was just a whiny emo rant. I even made the comment about the fact that the initial smiley face from the very first entry started to straighten and invert into a frown which gets more and more prominent as the entries go on. If I don't have people around me, most of my issues are gone, and then all I have to do is deal with the ever-present issue of failure and expectation (which would be easier to overcome with a 100% devotion to my studies).
You know I'll probably never do it. Just like everything else I plan on doing (like being able to handle 5.5 credits this past semester taking orgo and pchem at the same time... haha, yeah, that worked), it's just a great theory that'll never get put into practice.
I just spent half an hour writing this. It's 5 times longer than what I have done on my pchem lab report. And it didn't even do me any real good to write.
Once I started reliving the memory of my grandmother's hospital visit over the summer, I totally froze up and wasn't able to concentrate anymore. I don't know exactly what it was about thinking about it -- obviously my grandmother is back in good health -- but just something totally caught me off-guard and started the entire normal chain reaction going on in my head.
I'm already doing poorly in school... if something were to happen to them... I'd fall apart. I'd have to take at least a semester off, and I'd have to go back home, and I'd work full-time doing something, and I'd go back to school when I was ready, mentally, regardless of whether I had the capacity of knowledge to do so. Which leads to "would that really be so bad? isn't that more what your family's history says you're suited for anyway?"
Don't get me wrong: I really appreciated the sorts of things that I heard from Mike and Naila on my last post, and I really only get this way in spurts. Deep down, I know full well I belong at Yale, I know that I shouldn't believe that I should have settled for less than my expectations. But when my focus continues to be lost so terribly, when I have no idea of what direction I want to take my life, when other juniors are already planning every aspect of their senior years and I don't even know fully what I should take next semester, when the freshmen I know are able to do so much better in the same courses that I'm taking... I just feel mediocre, remedial, lost. I know the problem is 100% on my shoulders, that I'm just not devoted enough, not motivated enough, not meticulous enough in my studies. What I don't know is how to fix that without feeling so much worse about myself.
I already truly miss the people around me at college. Ever since getting back to Yale from Thanksgiving break, I've felt like my own desert island. I see my friends every so often, either over meals or [infrequently since I never really went, and now irrelevant since they're over now] in classes, but it doesn't feel like the connection is the same. Anyone who knows me well knows that I often live for my friends -- for better or for worse -- and would do anything for them. It makes me feel a little empty knowing that I've been neglecting them while I've been spiraling in my own personal hell hole.
Part of me wants to enter into a schedule like my friend Erin has at East Carolina -- wake at 5:30, take care of things around the room until 7 or so, study and do work until classes start, attend each one, eat along the way somewhere, come back, do more work, do more studying, eat dinner, do whatever errands there are in the evening (flute for her, CA work for me, I suppose), and go to sleep around 10. I feel like it would be healthy for me, especially since my health is often something I have to neglect. Of course, you'll note this leaves no time for socializing -- I'd pretty much just become a hermit.
Would that really be so bad? Or so different from how it is now? Often I feel like a burden on my friends, so many silly issues of my own, saying how I can't handle my load when others' aren't any lighter, always seeking advice for the most meaningless bullshit. In fact, that's half the reason I wanted to get rid of my other LJ name -- besides the fact that the username kinda sucked, it was just a whiny emo rant. I even made the comment about the fact that the initial smiley face from the very first entry started to straighten and invert into a frown which gets more and more prominent as the entries go on. If I don't have people around me, most of my issues are gone, and then all I have to do is deal with the ever-present issue of failure and expectation (which would be easier to overcome with a 100% devotion to my studies).
You know I'll probably never do it. Just like everything else I plan on doing (like being able to handle 5.5 credits this past semester taking orgo and pchem at the same time... haha, yeah, that worked), it's just a great theory that'll never get put into practice.
I just spent half an hour writing this. It's 5 times longer than what I have done on my pchem lab report. And it didn't even do me any real good to write.