So I'm going to try and breathe life back into this blog by doing Blog Every Day in April (Well Sort Of), which is when you decide to start Blog Every Day in April on the 5th of April, because you are both impunctual and fond of sticking it to the man.
I promised to blog about a Certain Thing to a couple of people a few weeks ago, and that one might surface during this month. I have half a draft of it, but I sort of hate that half a draft, so I might have to start from scratch.
So what am I going to talk about? At time of writing I have literally no idea. My instinct is to go towards political stuff, but I've started to suspect that teenagers posting their half-baked thoughts about political issues on the internet is perhaps not the best way to bring about positive social change.
Though to be fair, I don't think I have thoughts which aren't half-baked anymore. You can see it in the essays I futilely pound out for uni; I start off with a certified Good Idea then don't know where to take it.
That seems to become my attitude towards deciding What To Do With My Life, as well. Uni, for a lot of people seems to be this great watershed regarding goals. You go along basically doing what people tell you, the endgame being Get Into Uni, then once you're here your life is dumped into your hands, much to your chagrin. "A human life?!" you cry. "I don't know what to do with this!" To make it worse, you have already Gotten Into Uni. Which means you need new goals, goals you have to pick for yourself. Get a degree, yes, but more importantly figure out a life to lead once uni is over. And, yeah, it's terrifying.
Uni feels like a three-or-four-year limbo before being dropped into the Real World. Your degree is essentially a focal point around which you are supposed to design a Future, a plan of action to squeeze the most possible value out of this Life thing you've suddenly been given control of.
Which is where the half-baked ideas come in, because really I'm just grabbing at what are essentially abstract concepts, like "social work", "speech therapy", "emigrating", "getting a boyfriend", and trying to structure them into some kind of solid plan. For all my planning and dreaming, I can't grasp the reality of fifty-odd years in a job maybe raising a family.
I'm panicking, and the panic comes mostly from having no idea what I want, but still wanting it, and from recognising that whatever I choose will close doors, and maybe what I want will be stuck behind one of those doors. You get so caught up in staring down the gaping abyss of Adult Life and trying to figure out how to navigate it that you forget that you're also living a life now, and that that life needs attention, and oh shit you have three assignments to finish in a week.
I live half-baked life because so much of my energy is put into wishing and dreaming and being terrified, and I don't have enough left to make what I'm doing now the best it can be. Social interaction, or god forbid flirting, becomes a monumentous task you can't begin to comprehend. That thing you supposedly love, and are paying eight grand a year to study, looks bland and pointless and irrelevant to everything that matters, so why would you put your best efforts into it?
But in spite of all this, I'm not completely hopeless just yet. I live for the moments when you're doing something that really engages you and makes you forget to be nervous and terrified. Performing on stage. Laughing with friends. That one essay that really grabs you and makes you go several hundred words over the word limit.
I have hope that these moments will increase in frequency until my life doesn't look so half-baked after all.
Until then, I'll be procrastinating on tumblr.
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