Update

I have tried a new experiment this time. Rather than in one moment writing out all of my thoughts, I have kept a record of my thoughts and feelings over the course of the last week. The result is a little more disjointed than usual and in some ways more personal, be warned now. To give the short of it, this week was a few thousand steps backwards in terms of my emotional journey coming home. Additionally, I was hit is a new set back, my research project needs to be completely redone. There goes nearly a year of work. These are some of my reflections and while I could have kept them to myself, I did feel some need to post them more publically. I still don't know why I prefer this medium of sharing my life, perhaps it is because I acknowledge that I am not wise or experienced enough to understand myself and by publically stating it I hope for some kind of help. This feels more real. An honest acknowledgement of myself. It is a way to embrace who I am, because if I don't share it then it suggest there is something I dislike or am ashamed of about myself. Well, I suppose I should get on with it. These musings are for another time. 

It is amazing the need I feel to impact my surroundings, to truly inhabit them. I am suffocated by the endless fear that my absence will not be felt, particularly in a space I enjoyed inhabiting. If I've found a home, a place worth being, then I want to mark it as my space, wrap myself in the scenery, make an indention in the matter that makes my absence a void, a reminder that I am not there. For I know that to be forgotten is a true death. To be forgotten by people you care about, a more true death than any in mortal flesh. (I find the drama, while melancholy in nature, also peaceful because my feelings are melancholy in nature and weigh me down. It makes me sad to think that honesty and phrasing make others rebuke and mock my feelings. There is truth in melodrama. Sometimes things are felt strongly enough to warrant strong responses. Just because language seems extreme it doesn't mean I don't have the experience to judge it so and or that I am trying to manipulate people into being sympathetic.)  It feels as though my life before England was filled with half emotions. To feel is to be alive. I remember the haze only interrupted by Gencon and moments of embarrassment. I recognize that memory is an untrustworthy historian, and I'm sure there were a few happy moments as well as there were sad ones in England. Memory is all I have and I think back to the moment where I sat beside someone I cared about and thought, come a months time or two, I will be sitting somewhere else, far from this person and the new place will feel more real than this moment. This space will be only memory and imagination, a pale replacement for real life. I will begin to question its reality and make fictitious accounts of this experience. It will no longer be the present. I will lose its presence in my self and I will be entrenched in an experience which lacks even an ounce of the life I so enjoyed. I will be trapped in a foreign place which I have no desire to impart myself into. I will mourn a space I left more strongly than any person who still inhabits the space around it. Because I know that my impact will be lost. Like an impression in snow, my presence is impermanent. I will be forgotten. I will die. 

and no, it will not be a quick death. It will be a slow one. Like a terminal patient, I will get many visitors for a time, then fewer and then none. I anticipate the loneliness and that loneliness when it comes will be unbearable. 

The emotions I am having are unstable at best and self destructive at worst. My back has clenched in more ways than I can count and despite spending an hour meditating and trying to relax, I only felt a deep pain in both my upper and lower back. I get anxious all of the time, often without reason. I have been prone to burst of anger so red and hot that the thought of punching someone or something was appealing for the catharsis. I feel like I can't rely on my friends because they don't quite understand these feelings and many are struggling with their own version of suffering. To rely on them would be cruel and burdensome, Particularly when there is little they can do. Sympathy or empathy are unhelpful as while they may alleviate temporary stress and frustration, when those feelings are constant, it becomes disingenuous. My attempts to find solutions have all been met with failure and I am stuck and hopeless. I just need something to change and I've run out of options or the only changes I see are ones that are worse. 

My family suggested medication or therapy and that terrifies me more. Why should someone live a way that makes them unhappy? Taking medication or even therapy feels like treating a symptom not a cause. It is a step to live with a situation, giving up, making a situation bearable. Why shouldn't we listen to our feelings? Why do I feel like everyone denies their feelings and expects me to do the same? 

One of the struggles is that my life is filled with so much tedium that there is often little time to seek alternatives. I waste my time with my courses which aren't preparing me for my future career and are meaningless boxes that I have to tick to receive a piece of paper that says I'm competent enough to continue my education. It is remarkable how little this year will impact my future and I am left questioning why it has to happen at all. I've taken the MCAT and my applications are sent out. I struggle to see how this year is making me a better physician and given the struggle it is to live through, I wish that I didn't have to bother. 

I have found some calm, today or yesterday, and this is through the realization that I have to find some way to make being alone fulfilling. Which for an extrovert like me is like asking a person to live in a desert with no water.  I read somewhere that happiness is about action. It is engaging in activity which makes you happy. Passivity is never going to make a person happy. And I do try. I have tried many times to actively pursue happiness, but with little luck these last couple months. It is funny, in moments where something resembling the activity I once liked occurs, I become giddy with emotion as all the emotions and outlets that have remained bottled up spill over. Similarly, in those moments alone, I still find the pain creep out and suffocate me. Where I thought I was done crying, I find more tears and suffering. 

Convenience and Professionalism, or lack there of

I should preface this by saying that I am doing better, or at least some version of better. I no longer feel like each day should be spent in bed and the amount of crying has subsided. I even have a few moments I enjoy here or there. So, while things are better, there are still plenty of things which frustrate me day to day. I still get sad and angry and there are still days where my bed seems to be more attractive than spending another moment here.

I am fortunately more busy. I think this is one of the main things to improve my mood. When I am busy, I don’t worry about the future and feeling productive has always been something that makes me feel good about myself. Though as a result, I have noticed that my mood often parallels my level of busy, with the beginning of a week beginning better than the end or the weekend. It is a weird cycle that tends to contradict most people’s feelings about the week and it leaves me often not emotionally available when other people are up for hanging out.

One of the ideas that I have been contemplating these last couple weeks is the idea of convenience. How much of our lives as humans is determined by convenience. There seem to be many levels of convenience. Things that are convenient and you do, things that are convenient but you don’t do, things that are inconvenient and you don’t do them and finally things that are inconvenient but you do them anyway. Convenience also seems to be a sliding scale with the activity falling into a careful cost reward calculation. Humans seem most inclined to do things that cost little and have a large reward. That seems to be darwinian in a way and thus natural. But to do something that is inconvenient seems to be contradictory for human nature. What does it mean to do something that is inconvenient? Does it suggest that you are betraying some natural part of yourself. I’m not sure I want an answer, but it has been something on my mind as I consider how my life is structured now and how I want to structure it in the future. To what extent do I let inconvenience dictate my life, my relationships.

The other concept which has been popping up in my life a lot is professionalism, in particular the lack of it here at Jewell. It is a systemic problem of both the faculty and students here at Jewell to check their email and respond in a timely manner. I don’t care how busy you are, it is irresponsible to not be reachable by email. In particular, my pre-med advisor has been bad at getting to me about medical school aps, the athletics department took forever to email me back about archery, and most of all my sorority sisters are completely failing at being available. This lack of professionalism leads to me feeling alone and isolated. I’ve gone back to the old way of thinking that I can’t rely on anyone but myself to get things done. It becomes frustrating when you feel as though other people are holding you back. One particular anxiety I have is concerned with my medical school applications. I am still waiting on Oxford and my administration to handle my grades. Without my transcript, I can’t even submit my med school applications. The first deadline (Sept 30) is fast approaching and I am left stagnated waiting on other people to get their shit together.

It is an unending string of frustration here. Finally after nearly a week from when I went into the offices to inquire about archery they got back to me, perhaps the only good news I have had in awhile. I can’t rely on this community to support me. The infrastructure is weak. I never felt like I had this problem when I was in Oxford, even when I had two tutors bail on me.
In fact, my whole education here has been an unending string of frustrations. Last week, I came to the realization that a majority of my tutorials here at Jewell were from first time tutors. In fact, all the current biology tutors are tutors who has me as their first tutee. I have systematically trained and become the benchmark for all the tutorials at Jewell in the Molecular Biology program. The person in charge of my program now had her first tutorial experience with me my sophomore year. I can’t help but feel like my education has suffered from this string of misfortunes. Add on the fact that I am the single Molecular Biology major in my grade and that my experience was already unique to begin with. I just feel the weight of this frustrations on me every day as I am inconvenienced left and right by other people. As I suffer each strike against me that could have seriously negative consequences on my future, a future that I am already sacrificing for.

So yes, I suppose my latest emotional thrust has been one of deep anger and frustration and not one of depression. Still there is a sort of hopelessness that accompanies these frustrations, so much of it is beyond my control. A common theme of this year seems to be having to accept with resignation what is happening to me, because the commitment I made was one of ignorance but not without reservation. Now I am vindicated by the reservations I had but it is to late. I must lie in the bed I made.