Reality check.

I’ve been away for a while.  Sometimes, as much as I love writing on this blog and as much as it usually helps me sort out my feelings, I need to figure things out for myself and in my own head before I can share them with others.  It’s been a turbulent few days, two weeks? Sadly, I can’t even remember the date of my last post.  I feel like reality has pitched me off a cliff face first with no promise of a safe landing.  It’s not really a great feeling.

Thankfully, I’m on Spring Break this week, so I was able to come home and talk to my parents about all the craziness in my life.  While I’m not convinced they truly understand my feelings about the whole graduate school business, I feel like our chat over dinner last night proved to them that I am serious about this, that I know what I want, and that I will do anything it takes to make my dream a reality.  I think they have a clearer picture of where my head is, but I’m not sure they will ever appreciate how strong my passion for this is.  How could they?  It’s something very few people understand.  Most kids walk around campus counting down the days until graduation, trying to figure out how many classes they can skip without failing, and cramming BS assignments in the night before they’re due.  Now I can’t say that I’ve never skipped class or that I’ve never had to cram in an assignment, but I can say that I walk around campus with a much different perspective.

I look around me at the trees, the buildings, the library, students carrying books, the union, everything…. and know in my heart that this is where I belong.  I belong in a place dedicated to knowledge and learning.  I belong in a place where people far wiser than me will surround me daily.  I belong on a university campus, and I know this more steadfastly than I have ever known anything in my life.  It scares me a little to be so sure, scares me that the one time I am so sure about my purpose in life will be the one time when I can’t make things work out correctly.  It scares me, but it also fills me with a fire, a fire to make it happen, a fire that will give me the strength to endure and to chase this reality I so desperately want for as long as it takes to succeed.  I know that I can do this.  I know that I want to do this.  I will do this.  Simple.

Sometimes it amazes me how the things we think will be so complicated end up being so simple.  I worry a lot about pretty much everything.  I’m sure you’ve noticed that by now.  If not, keep reading; you will soon.  Sometimes I think we anticipate complications and create our own self-fulfilling prophecies.  We can’t imagine something being simple.  Everything must have some kind of complication.  We expect complications, so we find them.  Perhaps we should just take a step back and realize that we can see work as a complication or we can see it as a chance to grow.  Everything in this life is an opportunity for growth.  We can understand our lives as constant progress or we can focus only on the fact that there may be complications down the road.  For me, I choose to focus on the right now.  If I am happy and fulfilled with the right now, if I can smile right now, then I know that God has put things in my life for that reason  - to make me smile, to help me see that life is about perspective.  Sometimes the things that mean the most in this life are the things that require the greatest risk, the worst chance of getting hurt, of failing.  I’ve learned that fear of such outcomes will try to dominate our lives and make our decisions for us.  I’ve also learned that I never want to live that way.  I never want to let fear direct my actions.  I’d rather take the risk.

The day that loves all days.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

I decided today that my life might be a little bit sad.  Recently, I’ve been having intense separation anxiety from the library.  I miss it with its rows upon rows of books, mediocre coffee shop, and graffitied wooden study carrels.  I’ve begun to envy my friends’ freedom to spend a day in the library.  I’m even missing long nights of reading and paper writing and getting kicked out via announcement over the loud speaker.  I’m dying here.  This is just sad.

Then again, what kind of student would I be if I didn’t yearn for more free time in the library?  While I love my students and my support staff at my internship, I hate the way I’ve become so removed from UCF, from the campus, from the student life…. I miss the days of waking up for class, meeting friends for lunch, reading in the library, and staying up late to finish a paper.  I am not an 8-5 kind of person.  It’s too confining, the schedule.  I am gone all day, and by the time I get back to campus, pretty much everything is closed.  People are gone; classes are all ending.  I haven’t even been to the middle of campus for weeks.  I miss my life as a student.

If I had been smart enough to put the pieces together last semester, I would have appreciated my last semester as an actual student more than I did.  I was jaded and unaware, unaware that December 7th, not May 6th, marked the end of my days of being a full-fledged UCF student.  Yes, I’m still enrolled right now and yes, I still live on campus, but I feel so disconnected.  I feel like a pretend student.  I do not like it.  I am not an 8-5 person.

Perhaps this is why the life of a grad student and a college professor appeals to me so much.  If my dreams come true, I will never have to be an 8-5 person.  I will always be able to pencil in lunch with a friend, to read a book in the afternoon.  I will be able to move around, walk from building to building during the day.  I will not be confined to one room in one building all day.  I don’t know how people do it.  Let me reinforce, I am not an 8-5 person.  I am not a cubicle person.  I am not even a huge corner office with panoramic views of the ocean person.  I am a student’s life kind of person.  I am an academic.

I am an academic eagerly awaiting her place in higher academia.  I am in love with learning.  Happy Valentine’s Day.