Location: Liminality
In what could arguably be the understatement of a lifetime, the past two years have been incredibly tumultuous. Despite the ups and downs (and, as any regular readers of this blog can attest, there have been a lot of downs), on Sunday, I successfully dispatched that period of my life by walking on stage, shaking Graham Spanier's hand, and receiving my diploma from the Pennsylvania State University. It's a matter of record now: I have a nice piece of paper that they can't take away from me, and a declaration from the Board of Trustees that they really meant it.
I'm free. I'm free!
But if my feelings were as simple as that, there would be no need for a post here, would there? After all, this is the more meditative, complex side of what I choose to reveal online. It's where I go to verbally work out the conflicts that I feel need to be worked out, whether they are actually anything of substance or just matters of strict self-importance. And this conflict goes about as deep as any other I've experienced in my short life, for it's not at all simple to explain how I've been waiting for months and months for this day to come but nevertheless find myself regretting having wished that time away.
Time out. Again, it's not that simple. Do I wish I had time to work on my papers a bit more, or to regretfully ignore the course reading that I just couldn't manage to complete? Absolutely not. (Let's be perfectly clear here: someday, somehow, I will read the entirety of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa--all 1500+ pages of it--but to assign it as reading during Week 12? That's just fucking cruel and unusual.) The stress of work has been the thing that has had the most adverse impact on my happiness during my grad school tenure, so of course I won't be sorry to see it go.
The bad feelings I have now are in the same vein as those I felt prior to my departure from Princeton: namely, that I had one last chance to see all my friends before we went off on our separate paths. And sure, I had a whole month to enjoy their company then, and I also am fortunate to have kept in good contact with almost all of them, and Reunions is probably the single most incredible experience we as alumni can have and that gives us all the chance to see each other with some regularity. All of these things helped to mediate the feeling that there was some kind of finality to the relationships I had with them.
That was never the case at Penn State--at least not until very recently. From the start, when I came to the bruising realization that this whole gig wasn't for me, the whole experience had been mentally sheathed in a veil of temporariness. It was little more than a pit stop along the larger path of my life, a cheesy roadside tourist trap that sucks you in for longer than you expect it to, provides a few fun stories down the line, but is ultimately forgettable in the grand scheme. I'd had some wonderful experiences and met some fantastic people, but I feel like I did a lot early on to put some distance between me and these people and events. I didn't let myself get too deep, too invested in my feelings for them, because I knew that I would be putting actual distance between me and them very soon. I trained myself well to be ready to throw this away.
But Destiny had other plans. I feel like Alanis Morissette put it best when she said, "Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything's okay and everything's going right." It didn't matter that I'd decided precisely how I wanted to frame this phase of my life because, like it or not, to borrow one of my recent catchphrases, "This is happening." And it's happening the way it should, and not the way I want to--which, I've had to learn, are not the same thing.
I don't have any problem with this. I feel incredibly blessed that, in the past month, I've been given a very clear indication of why I came to State College in the first place--even if I'm still not sure what the ultimate take-home point is supposed to be. But I'm having a hard time flipping the switch in my mind, to quickly adjust from (for all intents and purposes) not really caring about this place and anything associated with it to suddenly having very deep, emotional investment in what's happened here. And what's even more difficult is that, once that change started to happen, I started to realize that there were other things (especially other people) that I discovered I would have a hard time just letting go. It was as if I'd kicked away a single stone and the whole thing began to cave in.
So I'm having a really hard time now trying to negotiate the fact that, with the end of this part of my journey, I feel like I'm still trapped in the middle of an indiscriminate...something. It most frequently manifests itself in the same kind of guilt that I'm experiencing right now: I know I have over a week where I have zero responsibilities and zero plans, but I can't help but feel that there's something I should be doing. Should I be reading more? Watching all the TV and movies I told myself I'd watch (like, God help me, Lost)? Working on the book or screenplay that I've been tossing around? Playing more video games? Hard to say--no sooner do I start doing one of those things than I feel like I should be doing something else. Like, perhaps, trying harder to find a job. So that I can get back into some kind of steady grind, the kind that I've been used to for so long and now, it seems, I can't escape from.
The last thing I want is for my life to slip into predictability so soon. And I've got opportunities at my feet to be able to kill that notion. But it's all part of the larger problem that I've got a lot of different paths and places that I could bring myself to right now, and I have no sense whatsoever of which is the right path to take. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a fucking pussy and that I'm scared to death of failure. I wish I had the balls to grab the bull by the horns and take the chances that I feel like I should. And I wish I really could live in the moment and just appreciate the here and now more, instead of constantly panicking about my future. But that's never been my style. I hate it, and I want to change it, but that's not me.
So here I am at a major crossroads. The past is, for all intents and purposes, done and resolved. I am what I'll be for right now. It's time to take a step down one path and, goddamn it, I don't know what to do. All I know is that if there's anything more horrifying to me than going the wrong way, it's standing still. But until I really get a good sense of what the next move is, here I stand. I wish it was all more clear. I wish it was all simpler. I wish I didn't hold myself to such ungodly unreasonable personal standards. I wish I had the fortitude to follow the things I believed in most and trust that everything would take care of itself the way I try to trick myself into thinking it will.
But it's never quite that simple, is it? Damn.
I'm free. I'm free!
But if my feelings were as simple as that, there would be no need for a post here, would there? After all, this is the more meditative, complex side of what I choose to reveal online. It's where I go to verbally work out the conflicts that I feel need to be worked out, whether they are actually anything of substance or just matters of strict self-importance. And this conflict goes about as deep as any other I've experienced in my short life, for it's not at all simple to explain how I've been waiting for months and months for this day to come but nevertheless find myself regretting having wished that time away.
Time out. Again, it's not that simple. Do I wish I had time to work on my papers a bit more, or to regretfully ignore the course reading that I just couldn't manage to complete? Absolutely not. (Let's be perfectly clear here: someday, somehow, I will read the entirety of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa--all 1500+ pages of it--but to assign it as reading during Week 12? That's just fucking cruel and unusual.) The stress of work has been the thing that has had the most adverse impact on my happiness during my grad school tenure, so of course I won't be sorry to see it go.
The bad feelings I have now are in the same vein as those I felt prior to my departure from Princeton: namely, that I had one last chance to see all my friends before we went off on our separate paths. And sure, I had a whole month to enjoy their company then, and I also am fortunate to have kept in good contact with almost all of them, and Reunions is probably the single most incredible experience we as alumni can have and that gives us all the chance to see each other with some regularity. All of these things helped to mediate the feeling that there was some kind of finality to the relationships I had with them.
That was never the case at Penn State--at least not until very recently. From the start, when I came to the bruising realization that this whole gig wasn't for me, the whole experience had been mentally sheathed in a veil of temporariness. It was little more than a pit stop along the larger path of my life, a cheesy roadside tourist trap that sucks you in for longer than you expect it to, provides a few fun stories down the line, but is ultimately forgettable in the grand scheme. I'd had some wonderful experiences and met some fantastic people, but I feel like I did a lot early on to put some distance between me and these people and events. I didn't let myself get too deep, too invested in my feelings for them, because I knew that I would be putting actual distance between me and them very soon. I trained myself well to be ready to throw this away.
But Destiny had other plans. I feel like Alanis Morissette put it best when she said, "Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything's okay and everything's going right." It didn't matter that I'd decided precisely how I wanted to frame this phase of my life because, like it or not, to borrow one of my recent catchphrases, "This is happening." And it's happening the way it should, and not the way I want to--which, I've had to learn, are not the same thing.
I don't have any problem with this. I feel incredibly blessed that, in the past month, I've been given a very clear indication of why I came to State College in the first place--even if I'm still not sure what the ultimate take-home point is supposed to be. But I'm having a hard time flipping the switch in my mind, to quickly adjust from (for all intents and purposes) not really caring about this place and anything associated with it to suddenly having very deep, emotional investment in what's happened here. And what's even more difficult is that, once that change started to happen, I started to realize that there were other things (especially other people) that I discovered I would have a hard time just letting go. It was as if I'd kicked away a single stone and the whole thing began to cave in.
So I'm having a really hard time now trying to negotiate the fact that, with the end of this part of my journey, I feel like I'm still trapped in the middle of an indiscriminate...something. It most frequently manifests itself in the same kind of guilt that I'm experiencing right now: I know I have over a week where I have zero responsibilities and zero plans, but I can't help but feel that there's something I should be doing. Should I be reading more? Watching all the TV and movies I told myself I'd watch (like, God help me, Lost)? Working on the book or screenplay that I've been tossing around? Playing more video games? Hard to say--no sooner do I start doing one of those things than I feel like I should be doing something else. Like, perhaps, trying harder to find a job. So that I can get back into some kind of steady grind, the kind that I've been used to for so long and now, it seems, I can't escape from.
The last thing I want is for my life to slip into predictability so soon. And I've got opportunities at my feet to be able to kill that notion. But it's all part of the larger problem that I've got a lot of different paths and places that I could bring myself to right now, and I have no sense whatsoever of which is the right path to take. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a fucking pussy and that I'm scared to death of failure. I wish I had the balls to grab the bull by the horns and take the chances that I feel like I should. And I wish I really could live in the moment and just appreciate the here and now more, instead of constantly panicking about my future. But that's never been my style. I hate it, and I want to change it, but that's not me.
So here I am at a major crossroads. The past is, for all intents and purposes, done and resolved. I am what I'll be for right now. It's time to take a step down one path and, goddamn it, I don't know what to do. All I know is that if there's anything more horrifying to me than going the wrong way, it's standing still. But until I really get a good sense of what the next move is, here I stand. I wish it was all more clear. I wish it was all simpler. I wish I didn't hold myself to such ungodly unreasonable personal standards. I wish I had the fortitude to follow the things I believed in most and trust that everything would take care of itself the way I try to trick myself into thinking it will.
But it's never quite that simple, is it? Damn.
posted by Dave at 5/19/2009 02:44:00 PM
2 comments
