#4. And then, that feeling came creeping in…
July 2, 2008 – 11:26 pmI abhor the seven days prior to the big P. You know, when the Reds are playing at home. When Aunt Flo is visiting.
The feeling is, at times, wedged in between this awful self-loathing and a cynicism I hardly recognize in myself anymore. All I want to do is drink chocolate milk and read Charles Bukowski under my comforter with a flashlight. That makes me sound much more intellectual than I really am; really, it’s the responsible alternative to crying, lots of vodka, and the Lifetime Network.
Teaching Introduction to Psychology this summer forced me to read material that, up until this point, I had been putting off. Stuff about Freud, stuff about schizophrenia, stuff about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, what-have-you. There are all of these theorists that have all of these… well… theories about the search for identity, lack of identity, and identity crises. I question the validity of these, no doubt, but I believe there is some kind of truth to the necessity of a personal identity. You need to know what kind of person you are, this is certain, but I also feel you need to know what kind of person you have been and what kind of person you hope to become. I feel these things are fairly separable. Maybe not independent, but separable. This gives me hope.
I am awfully hard on myself when I consider the past, but I realize that this makes me want better for myself. The kind of person I am now is good. She is having a bad couple of days, but she is good. She smokes too much. She swears a lot. She, apparently, farts in her sleep after a hearty dinner of pinto beans and chicken breast. She can be neglectful of her friends from time to time. These are all things currently being considered for the hope to become category (except for the beans thing, because hey–that’s just awesome).
One of the greatest questions that I am currently trying to answer with my life is this: at the end of the day, what do I want to look back and see? What accomplishments? What people? I’m starting to discern the things that matter from the things that don’t. So I wrote a list of what I did, and didn’t, want to see.
I’m not going to see my GPS, I’m going to see where I’ve gone. I’m not going to see my iPod, I’m going to remember the music I’ve heard. I’m not going to see my house, I’m going to see the life that was built here. I’m not going to see my salary, I’m going to see the face of one student whose life I changed for the better. I’m going to look back on all of the love, support, and knowledge my family has given me. Hopefully, I’m going to see children–which would totally rock, because I’ve kind of already picked out their father.
Right now I’m working on writing a literature review for my dissertation proposal. This is not making matters any better. In between wanting to pull my hair out, I swing from completely motivated to completely frustrated in the course of several minutes. I have hit the “delete all” button more times than I care to admit. I am trying to get as much of this done as possible today and tomorrow, because I plan on spending the weekend with my Favorite People on Earth. People That Love and Care About Me an Incredible Amount.
The mere fact that I live in a life that lives in a world where the previous paragraph doesn’t seem completely out-of-the-ordinary gives me great joy. I am incredibly lucky, and the big sissy that lives inside me, the one with the Charles Bukowski and the chocolate milk, needs to piss off. There’s no reason to spend one second of this short, short life hitting the snooze button on the wallowing clock.