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gementSo I've started grad school and recovered from the week-long cold, and I'm having some financial aid problems, but this is actually going to be an emotional post for once! First time in like two years, eh.
I skimmed through my sister's journal for the first time in months and found that I'm all jealous of her. Again. It always used to be because she was perceptibly cooler than me (or at least I was perceiving it that way) and I felt clumsy and un-hep in comparison.
See what I get for using the word "hep".
Now she just sounds... happy. Or plugged in. Spiritually in touch, I think that's the phrase I'm looking for. She has the usual life's worth of work and health irritations going on, but she's using the shiny woo-woo vocabulary for them. She thinks about her emotional health. She wants to join a commune. She talks about losing a member of her "heart community," by which she means the people that she considers members of her close spiritual family, and I realize I've never built one of those, or if I did, I don't remember.
She sounds like she's living on mango juice and organic grains and love, all the time, and I know most of the bare facts of her life are on the same scale as mine, but the framing, the context is always more important than the facts. I want to live on mango juice and love, and instead I'm living on sensibleness and lists and trying to be responsible.
Because maybe if I'm careful and responsible and do the things on my lists, I'll do better than when I was an undergraduate fuck-up. That's running away, not toward. When I asked L. about her plugged-in-ness, she thought about it, and said that she didn't have any particular advice, or even any particular goal, except "I'm trying to be me just as hard as I can, all the time." And I'm afraid that my me is boring and mundane and makes lists and worries and does not get mango juice.
Jason suggests that L. sounds like she has something to believe in. When I think about that, all I get is wracking sobs, deep body regret and sadness. I'm crying in the computer lab right now and I hope no one is noticing how my face is dripping. What do I believe in? Nothing. Lists. Being responsible.
When I sit with it a little longer, I find a belief, but an external one. I believe that the best thing I can do with my life is help people grow up more and better, which I can do by offering the right tools, the right information, for where they stand right now. Hence, library school, so that I can do that on a sheerly practical level and get good theory on how to do it in other aspects of my life.
But that's how to help other people. I don't know how to help me. I don't know how to grow myself up more and better, and I don't know how to plug into the big good feeling, and I'm very sad about that.
I skimmed through my sister's journal for the first time in months and found that I'm all jealous of her. Again. It always used to be because she was perceptibly cooler than me (or at least I was perceiving it that way) and I felt clumsy and un-hep in comparison.
See what I get for using the word "hep".
Now she just sounds... happy. Or plugged in. Spiritually in touch, I think that's the phrase I'm looking for. She has the usual life's worth of work and health irritations going on, but she's using the shiny woo-woo vocabulary for them. She thinks about her emotional health. She wants to join a commune. She talks about losing a member of her "heart community," by which she means the people that she considers members of her close spiritual family, and I realize I've never built one of those, or if I did, I don't remember.
She sounds like she's living on mango juice and organic grains and love, all the time, and I know most of the bare facts of her life are on the same scale as mine, but the framing, the context is always more important than the facts. I want to live on mango juice and love, and instead I'm living on sensibleness and lists and trying to be responsible.
Because maybe if I'm careful and responsible and do the things on my lists, I'll do better than when I was an undergraduate fuck-up. That's running away, not toward. When I asked L. about her plugged-in-ness, she thought about it, and said that she didn't have any particular advice, or even any particular goal, except "I'm trying to be me just as hard as I can, all the time." And I'm afraid that my me is boring and mundane and makes lists and worries and does not get mango juice.
Jason suggests that L. sounds like she has something to believe in. When I think about that, all I get is wracking sobs, deep body regret and sadness. I'm crying in the computer lab right now and I hope no one is noticing how my face is dripping. What do I believe in? Nothing. Lists. Being responsible.
When I sit with it a little longer, I find a belief, but an external one. I believe that the best thing I can do with my life is help people grow up more and better, which I can do by offering the right tools, the right information, for where they stand right now. Hence, library school, so that I can do that on a sheerly practical level and get good theory on how to do it in other aspects of my life.
But that's how to help other people. I don't know how to help me. I don't know how to grow myself up more and better, and I don't know how to plug into the big good feeling, and I'm very sad about that.
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-04 05:17 pm (UTC)I don't know what I can offer you to make you feel better. :( It seems like your sister is living the life she wants, and so she is peaceful, joyful, inside herself. As to what would help you to feel the same way, I don't know. Feeling acomplished because you are setting and reaching goals? Meditation or religion or volunteer work, helping you feel connected to a larger good? Learning to spend time with yourself, in silence, and accept with love who you are?
You are not boring. Even if external things were stripped away, the ways you interact with people, or roles you take on, or habits of dress and behavior, the you that remains is still not boring, and is interesting and worthwile.
And hey, if someone who's known you this long and though so many times you were struggling with stuff can say that, it's probably true. :)