It’s 2am on a Tuesday night and I’m awake watching New Girl and eating craft mac and cheese and trying to write this post while my contacts try to peel themselves out of my eyes. I’ve decided I won’t be going to my 8am class, because I barely sleep anymore, and I have so much work to catch up on. I feel guilty about it sometimes, the amount of financial investment going into this education and my inability to take it very seriously. But life is weird like that. It’s like the world encourages you to care about things that really don’t matter, like the numbers and letters assigned to your intelligence or your net worth in terms of years labored away in educational facilities.
Life is weird in a lot of ways. When I think about home, it feels like this distant place and time. When I see pictures of the places I know, I can picture them in my mind but it feels like I would have to travel and insurmountable distance to reach them. I don’t feel homesick, but rather like I’ve finally gained the space to look back on the last eighteen years and think about all the things I’ve experienced.
When I left for college, my dad told me that so much of the benefit is in the social experience of higher education. The longer I’m here, the more I really understand that. I sort of always knew that I would have a better time meeting people in college. Maybe I’m saying that prematurely, and I’ll lose the connections I have here like I did back home. But it really is a different experience. When you find the right people, being around them doesn’t feel like a chore. They aren’t ever people I grew up with, or people I recognize from school. I see Stirling around every now and then, but other than that there is the absence of familiarity and I have grown to love it. When you are separated from everything you know and all the vices you’ve learned to use as a coping mechanism, it’s like this sort of intuition kicks in and seeks out people and places that will make you feel whole and okay. Without the places and people I’ve learned to trust, my body has somehow managed to define a new sort of familiarity. People I have only known for a couple months can fill hours of my time and it doesn’t feel hollow the way it did back home sometimes.
Maybe this is just the way I experience growth. Maybe I always feel this way when I am around new people, and over time things will settle back into the melancholy rut I was so used to back home. I guess right now I’m not really worrying about it. I try not to worry so much anymore. Sometimes I’ll miss class and sometimes that might detrimentally affect my grade but I am still here, and that in itself is enough. I’m doing my best. I don’t have an eight year plan or a five year plan or even a this year plan but I have never been the kind of person who lives life in blueprints. Things just sort of happen and sometimes it’s exhilarating and sometimes it makes me feel purposeless and sometimes I can sleep it off and sometimes I need a little help.
I hope the way things are now is not just some peculiar transitional phase, because I like the temporary mentality I’ve developed over the last few months. It’s so easy for time to be fluid when you’re not tied down by a locational history. Sometimes I’ll walk somewhere in town that I have been before, and that is enough to keep me grounded.
There’s a lot more I could say. Not that any of this makes sense or matters to anyone else or is important in any way. I’ve been joined in this study lounge by two other kids. I wonder if being awake right now is weird for other people. It’s not super normal for me. Tanya and I are having a nice talk now.
I suppose this is a good place to say goodnight.