crises seem to be the scene du jour for my classmates right now, so much so that i’m having a bit of a meta-crisis because i don’t really feel like putting on a tutu and getting on the roof for a rousing rendition of wooly-booly.
what’s wrong with me?!

seriously, though, it’s not the first time that i’ve felt compelled to wonder if my venting mechanisms are poorly wired, and now i’m starting to think about what it means with respect to my budding professional and/or academic goals.

it’s not like the first weeks of school haven’t provided me with things to rant about, and it’s not like i don’t feel signs of some slippage, but what i’m most worried about isn’t freaking out, it’s dropping out (not in the leaving school sense, or in the timothy leary sense… ok maybe i should pick a different metaphor… stepping back? but that doesn’t have the “out” in it for symmetry… whatever).

to put it more directly, i am coming to believe that the danger for me is not that i will collapse from the pressure of taking on too much, but that i will, in the name of preserving my sanity, convince myself that i shouldn’t feel any responsibility to take on any more than is comfortable (what are you trying to prove?, the grog challenges me in the morning, as i choose between sleeping another hour and getting up to work), and as a result, i will never find out what i can really do if i put my whole self on the line.

somewhere sometime somehow i came to equate wisdom with resisting the rat race, and over time the truth behind that impulse (keep perspective, don’t think that your worth is a function of the success of any of your specific endeavors, don’t forget to just enjoy being alive) has become tangled up with a fear of looking stupid (by not being wise, i suppose, despite the fact that i’m quite ready to admit that being afraid of looking stupid is a surefire way to avoid the accrual of wisdom… just because brains are rational does not mean that they always make sense), and so the result is that i stay on the fringes of my potential, waiting for a strong enough sense of rightness to yank me into the fray and give me the conviction that i need to both get things done and keep my head above water.

i’m either getting closer or i’m just getting sick of waiting, but admitting that to myself sometimes causes a backlash, and i seek equilibrium by staying in bed all morning, or by not doing something i said i was going to do and telling myself that i was asking too much. that’s what my meta-crisis felt like last week, and that’s when i actually started this entry, so it feels a bit different to be finishing it now. maybe i should disallow drafts for a while because otherwise i’ll try to hard to get it “right” when all i’m trying to do is get something out…
that’s another topic.

for now i’m just saying that i feel a bit less stuck in my head about whether i’m doing enough to stay on top of what i have to do, but i’m also feeling somewhat precarious… i got some good things done this week but i’m not confident in my ability to sustain my momentum, or in how much it matters one way or another. that’s the question i really have to tackle before i dive in for the long haul.

Here’s a song I like when I get to wondering whether success as we tend to conceive of it is just an excuse for not thinking about troubling things. If you like it, you should buy the whole album; it’s good stuff, and just about every song there hits me at one time or another.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 5:04 pm and is filed under school, self-conscious blather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.