Homework for the Overactive Brain

Today's Quote--"Happy birthday to me, Happy birthday to me..."

Monday, March 01, 2004

 

Hmmm. I'm jaded. I don't want to be. I want my dreams and peaceful joy back. When did reality come up and bite me? Who let it do that? Why are all these sophomores and freshmen suddenly children in my mind? Especially when I know I was right there where they sit today. I miss loving SUA. I miss loving the challenge of classes. I miss finding homework reading entertaining. I miss my motivation. I miss feeling like I knew what was going on. I miss feeling like I knew where I was going. I don't like this jaded feeling. I can't appreciate the youthful idealism of my fellow students. I can't appreciate the challenges that have arisen to make me a better person. I can't look at the future with those rose tinted glasses any longer. Who broke them? I did. I know, somewhere, the rose colored splinters of glass lay scattered, next to my dreams, my quiet hopes, my student confidence, my motivation, the fullness of my being. I'm still here, the parts that have always been, but now, I feel like a shell, surrounded by sckepticism and doubt, hollow and echoing. I pull, I look deeper, I dig, and I see the shards, I see them sitting down there, but I just can't bring myself to put them back together. It's too much work, it's too much thought, it's too much of an emotional effort.

Do I have idealism left in me? Can I once more attend a student forum and not lose my appitite? Will it all come back someday? But, how long do I have to wait? How long before I can see the future as full of hope and promise? I pull up my dreams, wrap them around me once again, dreams perhaps long forgotten, or long hidden, but the cold wind of realism comes and shows me all the cracks and spaces, the cold drafts making me shiver and forget to hold on tightly. I feel like I am grasping at straws, at nothing, at wind.

For once, the spring turmoil is purely mine. It revolves in my head. There will be no emergency student meeting. There will be no coverage in the Pearl. There will be no outcry, demanding justice. It will be me, here, in my room, staring at my books, at my papers, at my work, and begging my mind to cooperate, just this one more day, just this one more assignment, to do, to work, to think. It will be me, trying to keep that positive face, the one I have worked so hard to develop. It will be me, trying to regain my dreams so that I once more can speak with these youth, these bright-eyed, excited, idealistic youth. If I could be niave, if I could find my way back...if I could appreciate the experiences that led me here, if I could share them, and have others learn, if I could only pull all this random emotion back together and use it as a driving force rather than a stopping one. If I could put, "Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it." (James Baldwin), into my life. If I could find my way back...

Once again, Eeyore is lost and alone in the 100 Acre Woods. Searching, quiet, scared, but always, always, looking. Soon? How soon? Please...very...

Daring to find my dreams...Today. And looking again, tomorrow.

GL 2:47 PM