Fear and Self-Loathing in New Jersey

I've never understood the aphorism, "When it rains, it pours." It's not that I don't get what the phrase actually means -- that's obvious enough -- but rather that I never figured out how it manages, without fail, to manifest itself as truth all the time. Isn't there any sense of balance, some distributive force, going on in the world? I suppose it's not that simple, but then, I've been learning that there are far greater things, in far greater number, that are far from simple.

This week has been a week of hard lessons, and while I'm not typically the one to delve too deeply into the more private forays of my life in a public setting, I need to get these thoughts out there because I cannot believe for one moment that I'm the only one experiencing them. The experiences I've been having -- the anger, the frustration, the disappointment -- has manifested itself in an growing wave of melancholy. When I bitched far too abstractly about a specific situation in my last post, I presumed at the time that my bad humor stemmed from a particular incident and that, consequently, once I moved past that incident, it would be over and I would start feeling better. But I haven't; far from it, in fact. Tonight, with a midterm breathing down my neck tomorrow, I haven't been able to summon up the motivation to study. I have a paper due Thursday on a topic of which I am really not certain. My thesis is due in approximately seven weeks and I haven't gained that sense of cohesion that I'm looking for. Things, generally, are not going my way.

Granted, the thesis thing is something that will require time, and the work will get done. Just like the paper and the midterm will get done, and most likely in a satisfactory (grade-wise) manner. But those are only temporary concerns, issues that will go away in three months time when I slip the bonds of Old Nassau and escape the orange bubble. They will be non-issues, I will have conquered them, and they will be over. It's the other things, the things that don't end when my Princeton career ends, that are bothering me now.

For one thing, I have to consider the fact that, almost two months after its submission, my portfolio still has not been approved by the powers that be at Teacher Prep. And quite frankly, that's really fucking irritating. I understand that there have been issues over there with regards to my case, and like a fool I've nodded and taken all their assurances and apologies up the ass all while forcing a smile on my grossly contorted face. But at this point, I don't feel like I really owe them the same kind of commitment I gave them in the fall, the same kind of commitment that wreaked immeasurable havoc on my emotional state and almost threw me headlong and unapologetically into an emotional breakdown. No one in that office was there for me when I went through that, and when I came out the other end and jumped through what I presumed was my last hoop, there was no sense that anyone really cared.

In fact, that's the single most troubling part of my experience: I've never once felt like a priority to them in that tiny little department. In my experience dealing with the rather larger English department, I've never once had a problem with either classes or bureaucracy, and my advisors and professors have been wonderful, patient, and genuinely concerned with my success. I don't get that vibe from the folks on William Street, and at this point, it's way too late for them to provide that feeling enough for me to really believe it to be true. And I see remnants of it now, with the fiasco that has been scheduling my portfolio defense -- where has the communication been? If it's so important, why has it been consistently put off for so long? Hell, even my English professor got frustrated with them, and she only communicated with my advisor for one weekend. I've reached the point of saturation with feeling unimportant, and I'm not about to start sticking my neck out for people that won't return the favor for me.

This is all notwithstanding the fact that the ultimate goal of my certification is to teach high school, a career path that has -- surely, to the great relief and happiness of Leslie Leogrande, if no one else -- fallen off the radar. I'm sure it would break lots of hearts to hear me say this, but I just don't want to do it. It doesn't feel right to me: I cannot believe that the bureaucratic bullshit alone and the struggle of dealing with the conflicting emotions of the August break-up could have really thrown me that far over the edge. I have to believe the stress of the job, the incessant pressure to keep focusing, and the subpar performance reviews -- all of which flew in the face of my own beliefs that I was focused and was working as hard as I could -- were a strongly mitigating factor.

I was not surprised today when my professor haphazardly offered a commentary on how quickly teachers burn out, and was even less surprised at her immediate attribution of the bureaucracy of preparation programs as a contributing factor to that burnout. I've done that once already, and I'm not ready to go down that path again. It scared the fuck out of me. It caused me to almost completely forget who I was and what I stood for. It cost me a lot more than I'd like to admit, and while I'm a better person now for surviving it, I also know I don't want to have to end up there again. And I'm really confident that being a teacher will send me down that path. I don't have the composition to do that, and it will make me horribly unhappy, but at this point I've earned the certification and I damn well deserve to have it. But for right now it's only adding to the frustration.

Yet the career thing is precisely the problem on the table right now, since it's all but secure that the next five years of my life, which had been so meticulously planned out, will not go at all as I had hoped. I've officially heard back from 5 of my 7 graduate schools, and received word that of the two remaining, I have but a tenuous hope remaining of getting into one of them, and nothing more. While there are those who would believe that I should take the high, optimistic road and hold out hope for the next few weeks, today I was forced to resign myself to the fact that I am most likely not going to grad school next year.

Even as I type those words, it breaks my goddamn heart and stirs up the fucking bile in my soul. Part of me understands the rational aspect of the whole thing: the gigantic applicant pools, the small numbers of spaces, the limited availabilities, the popularity and prestige of the programs to which I applied. I get it. It all makes complete sense. What doesn't make sense to me is why, of all the people I know and have talked to, I am the only person around here who isn't getting what they want next year.

Yes, I'm aware of how snobby and self-centered and childish that is, but I'm throwing it out there, like it or not, completely unapologetically. It boggles my mind. I'm not the greatest student here, I know, and I'm more than comfortable with the rung upon which I sit on the academic ladder. I am friends with a great many people on campus in the first quintile of GPA, who have oodles of grad school choices or offers for lucrative jobs of which they are very highly qualified, and I begrudge them nothing. They worked their asses off and earned these things, and they deserve them without question. But I also know people at the opposite end of the spectrum, who may not exactly be getting the slots in graduate courses, but are at the very least entertaining offers and seeing their plans for the next few years coming into very clear focus. What do they have to offer the world that I don't?

What exactly have I not done to be able to deserve to keep busting my ass and getting to where I want to be? Maybe the problem is that I'm too naïve or stupid to know the ins and outs of getting what I want, that I never learned the ropes while everyone else did. But I guess I wonder how the fuck I could have fallen so far behind in four years. Everyone around me seems to have that clarity and focus and understanding, and they're seeing their dreams being fulfilled. I, meanwhile, am sitting at a computer, bitching to God knows who (read: no one), and with my plans sitting in a ruined mess at my feet.

I'm horrified at where this leaves me and my immediate future. I know already that I don't want to teach, but what else exactly am I qualified for? Danielle suggested that there are a number of freelance writing opportunities available, and I could surely take some of them during my off time, but my passion is academia, and I truly want to be there. I'm horrified that I'll fall into some job for the sake of making money and then will never be able to escape and rejoin the career path I'm hoping for. I'm sure there are ways to stay in touch with the environment in which I ultimately hope to be, but I don't want to lose sight of it because of the logistics of independent living.

I never thought of school as an escape from independence but as a gateway thereto, and with the serious prospect of that being cut off far sooner than I was prepared for, I feel like I'm floundering. How will I afford to buy a car? Or car insurance? Health insurance? Gas money? Credit card bills? And what about all the other shit that's part and parcel of living on my own? If I need the money to do that, how can I remain focused on reaching the goal of a Ph.D and a professorship?

Then, of course, there's the issue that none of this affects only me. The recent string of engagements amongst my friends and family have served to remind me that I'm essentially biding my time until I can join those esteemed ranks. But how will I know when I'm actually ready to take that step? I need to evaluate many more things than just how much I love her (that much I'm certain of), and while I don't want to put that off any longer than I have to, I also don't want to end up not being able to support our life together because I'm trapped in some financial rut.

I guess the take-home of these meandering paragraphs is that my life and my happiness is very strongly based on stability. I don't mind the ups and downs, the twists and turns of life, but my vision of success and my emotional condition are inextricably linked with a sense of certainty, direction, and unequivocal purpose. Up until now, those things have never been an issue for me, and I've gotten from life everything I've hoped to. But now, the very foundation on which I was hoping to build the rest of my life feels like it's being swept out from under me and I don't know what to do or how to replace it.

All I know for sure is that each day is starting to feel like a ticking clock, a countdown towards some unknown inevitability, and it's not bad enough that I don't know how much time I have left -- I don't have a clue what happens when that time runs out.

Melancholia en Masse

There's been something seriously off about today. So off, in fact, that even after an astounding display of productivity -- in the form of striking in its entirety T.S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-room from the list of books I need to read for the semester -- I'm still completely unsettled. I awoke today at about 12:00pm, and after having spent much of yesterday in bed, and getting a full ten hours last night, I still feel groggy and exhausted. My body feels like it's rebelling against me: my lunch consisted of two small slices of pizza and a salad, and I felt bloated for much of the afternoon. Dinner was similarly small: a tiny bowl of pasta, a side of carrots, and some nibbling at an indistinguishable beef en croute that did nothing but contribute to my feelings of indigestion. I've been in a funk for the entire day, sharing nary a word with anyone in the club though the door to my room was propped open for the entire day. I spent almost no time online, sent one single text message but made no phone calls, and have engaged in little more than the exchange of pleasantries with the few human souls I've come in contact with over the past seven hours.

Unsettled has seemed to be the only right word to label things, since I can't figure out the exact source of my mental daze -- though I have a suspicion, which I'll get to later -- and I don't have the means or, frankly, the desire to explore the options required to eradicate the cloud hanging over me. The last time something like this happened, I did what I've done today: I've kept to myself, isolated myself, and hoped to drown my miseries in work or some other obligation. It's failed. So I figure now I owe it to myself to follow the professional suggestion Leslie offered me last week: whenever I get angry or upset or need to vent my emotions in some way, I should write them out. (A fine plan, I thought: isn't that the purpose of this thing anyway?)

The problem is that the last time I decided to write out my feelings, they were in no way appropriate for publication here -- which, if you've had the occasion to read the content of some of my posts, you would realize, speaks volumes about their contest. They were caustic, vitriolic words, spewed from my fingers stream-of-consciousness-style in a bitter bile of hate, resentment, and disillusionment. At the time, I hated everything at which I was angered, and my malice shifted without warning from one topic to the next but never seemed to come back and resolve any of it with any degree of certainty. Most distressingly were long periods in the text where I broke the fourth wall and asked myself, as narrator, the questions that I, as author, wished to truly answer; and instead of actually getting anywhere, I found that I was only more frustrated and more angry, which led to more questions and, ultimately, a complete detachment from what I'd set out to do that was so strong that I wrapped the text up frustratedly, saved it, and resolved not to look at it for a day or two, as was the original plan suggested to me.

I've yet to open it since. I haven't looked at it again because I don't really know if I have any reason to look at it. The problem I realized as I engaged in the writing, the problem that gave me pause and caused me to stop my ranting after a page and a half, the problem that I'm addressing more openly here though I know I could never hope to resolve in a single blog post -- that problem is that I can't ever seem to settle the source of my problems.

Back in darker days, at worse times, I realize now that I'd made the mistake of thinking I understood precisely the source of my concerns. Granted, at the time, the source seemed obvious, and the nature of the problem and the relative ease with which the solution presented itself placed all the blame and the cause of the issue's development squarely on my shoulders. It was my shitstorm, and I was the only one who would be able to drive myself out of it. So I took my time, unloaded my weighted mind, and did everything I could to focus on strengthening myself such that I would have the wherewithal to go through with the solution and bring myself back to some semblance of happiness with an added dose of confidence and strength to boot.

For a while, all seemed well. Then things began to take a turn for the worse -- and here, the speculation on my concerns begins, patient reader -- when I came to the conclusion that even though the resolution of that particular situation was my responsibility and mine alone, the responsibility for ensuring the enduring utility of said solution was not just in my hands. I had, in my ignorance, neglected to realize a lot of things -- and granted, they were concerns that I'd elucidated before and been honestly afraid of for quite some time; issues that I guess I'd decided were simply going to vanish and never did -- that were out of my control to resolve. The pressure of trying to get those things resolved, however, when I am in no position to actively do anything about them, is frustrating me, and it's causing a slip in faith that is by no means fatal but is also extremely disconcerting.

It's scary because it feels like the rug I've built for myself over the last three months is being pulled out from under me, and quite frankly, I need that rug to be there if I'm going to get out of this haze. It's not so much a crutch as it is a component: think about it as having a laptop whose wireless card suddenly and inexplicably shits the bed. The computer still works, many functions still operate, and there is another way to access the Internet and regain certain functionality; but the loss of that ability is crippling because it involves completely reevaluating where, why, and how one uses that computer in order to achieve the same kind of functionality it had before. It means not rebuilding the machine but rebuilding how to use it. Overcomplicated metaphor aside, I've learned that I'm not ready to rebuild the how. I don't want to have the solutions I was so certain of flushed down the drain because I was too ignorant to have thought things through. I also don't want to feel like I didn't consider everything like I promised myself I would. That would be far too much for me to handle.

At the same time, in leaving certain situations exactly as they are, they are becoming more volatile and more painful with each new day. This weekend, then, I will speculate, did not ultimately contribute to my good nature and jovial humor, as I'd anticipated it would. What it did was show that, not unlike before, there are serious and glaring situations that are being ignored. Sunday was like a microcosm of the problem at large: a huge amount of inactivity; a certain degree of incompatibility; a horrid lack of communication that was only increased over time; a misunderstanding that, by all accounts, was practically unavoidable yet still resented; severe shifts in tone from calmness and jocularity to hatred and screaming, all with little warning; a lack of resolution that only became furthered by forced departure, a departure that then compounded the original problems; and, most frighteningly, the ultimate realization that at the core of arguments and conversations that should be had but aren't, of problems that should emerge but are kept concealed, are very strong and dangerous personal issues that are present, known, and not being solved.

If I've addressed that all in an overly-veiled fashion, and it doesn't help anyone to understand things, then I'm afraid this whole thing is for naught and does nothing but help me. I did need to write it down, though, and this helped much more than simply letting my feelings spurt uncontrollably in fits of rage. The problem is that there's still a problem, and that even if I tell myself I'm ready to work on it and make it better, there's no guarantee it will change. There's no way to take something like that, something that weighs on you and crushes your frame until the psychological and physiological have no barrier between them, and just pretend it doesn't exist. I've never been the kind of person who could pretend that shit like that didn't exist. I have no choice but to wear my heart on my sleeve, but the exposure isn't therapeutic anymore like it used to be.

Things like this can't be slept off. I guess that's why ten hours wasn't enough. Or why almost eight hours of work hasn't been enough. Or why maybe this whole week won't be enough.

What scares me isn't so much dealing with it: it's not knowing when it may be resolved. That implies that the problem is more severe than I can currently fathom; it implies that the problem may take longer than I realize to fully resolve; and it implies that there is no definitely time frame for the ultimate resolution, and thusly no time frame for the beginning of relief from this overwhelming melancholy and frustration.

That's the thought that's been criss-crossing my mind since I awoke today. And it horrifies me.