Stepping Off ‘The Path’

In grad school, and adulthood, there is no ‘summer vacation’. This summer I’ve been a research assistant to two professors, as well as being a ‘substitute TA’ for another professor from time to time-since hardly anyone works with the department over the summer, that means I’ve been left as essentially the office energizer bunny. But, my batteries were stomped out of me, because, that’s grad school. Everything you ever love about your area of study gets stomped out of you from the workload and expectations. How am I supposed to devote both 9 hours a week to class, 35 hours to studying,(Yes, really, grad school is a full time job in itself) and 20 hours to essentially being my professor’s personal assistants?! (64 hour work week! And I don’t even make any money off of it!)

So essentially, I’m saying Grad School-in-summer is why I haven’t posted in forever. But GUESS WHAT. I’m ALMOST DONE.

That’s right, I did my thesis proposal and I PASSED. It’s time to buckle up for the fall semester-which starts next week. (But yay, 4 days of summer!!) and get out of grad school this December! In all this joy of being so close to being done, I’ve also found that…although I’ve essentially been stuck in ‘limbo’ these past 2 years…I still have no clue what I’m going to do with my life.

That’s right. I’m lost. But, for perhaps the first time in my life, I’m okay with that.

I know when I created this blog, I had certain ‘plans’ placed out about my future (Law School). But, this summer, I went through a major existential crisis.

I know what you’re thinking. Another millennial caught up in angsty life drama. Well screw that, at least we’re trying to figure ourselves out before we mess up this planet. But it’s true, I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing here. It probably goes back to me not being sure about grad school, and just signing up anyways because my school just basically offered for me to go. I just took the opportunity before me. And now, I just don’t know how to take a step forward when there’s no path laid out in front of me.

But, maybe I need that. Maybe a need to stop worrying about the path, and just go ‘off-roading’ for a moment.

This probably still doesn’t answer the question of why I decided to jump off the tracks towards law school. Well, it’s difficult to explain. First off, I started studying for the LSATs. It was all going to plan, I was doing well, progressing every week, and I felt like I could have a really good chance at having a good LSAT score to get into a great law school.

But then, I just, I felt trapped. I kept going forward with the studying, but, I just felt so incredibly anxious. I couldn’t understand where that anxiety was coming from, so I just studied harder, started doing research on what I could do with a law degree to keep my spirits up about what I could accomplish once I had my degree. But that only made my anxiety worse.

I just couldn’t understand it. I was driving myself essentially into insanity trying to figure out how to just buckle up and keep moving forward, until finally something broke in me.  I had a full on panic attack, night after night, for a couple weeks. I was a complete, mental, mess.

It wasn’t until I fell apart that finally could hear the part of me that was trying to say something this entire time.

This whole time I was having a mental breakdown, it was because my gut, my ‘heart’, was trying to tell me something that my ‘brain’ didn’t want to acknowledge. Once I had that breakdown, I suddenly heard what my intuition had been trying to scream at me all along:

This was not my path. I am not meant for this.

Once those words crossed my mind, I was suddenly calm. I was shocked, but I was finally able to take a breath. The cloud in my mind that had been suffocating me finally cleared. I didn’t even feel upset. I felt relieved. I don’t believe in Christianity, or Islam, or any monotheistic, one ‘true god’ that controls everything (because if there was, I’d have a lot of questions about suffering of children and innocents) but I do believe in the universe, and that there are things going on here that we can’t completely understand. And I think sometimes, the universe does try to get our attention through our own intuition. This was my intuition speaking, the core of my ‘soul’. I am not meant for this.

Now, there’s been many times when my intuition has screamed at me, and I’ve even felt this way before at a different stage in my life: when I moved to Canada to become a working student, in the hopes of becoming a professional trainer. I had a breakdown then as well, and a similar voice was saying: This is not my path.

There was an inner struggle going on that I wasn’t even aware of, and instead of listening to myself, and understanding what my heart and my intuition were trying to say, I ignored it. Probably, because I knew deep down what the problem was, and I didn’t want to face it. I also didn’t want to ‘give up’ on this dream of mine, because, for so long, I had this idea in my head that being a lawyer was the only way I was going to be able to do something about the causes I care about. But, that’s not true, and I should have realized that a long time ago. And, it wasn’t even the actual work of studying that was stressing me out, something different was happening. It wasn’t that I felt like I couldn’t do it…it’s that, I felt that I shouldn’t be. And I should have realized that I couldn’t ignore what my heart was trying to tell me, if what I want is to become who I’m supposed to be.

So, who am I supposed to be? That’s still not clear yet. But, I know the first place to figuring that out is looking inside myself a little more, instead of trying to create myself in something that’s just not right for me.

Although I’m stepping away form the path I intended to go, I feel like I’m headed towards something better. I’m hopeful again, I’m at peace with myself. And I’m going to take that as a sign that I’m stepping in the right direction.

The ‘Lost’ Years

This is a common theme that continues to emerge in nearly every one of my posts, and that’s probably-no definitely-because the last year of my life, and the next year of my life, is just a confusing time that has left me in the inability to move forward.

I don’t want to complain about my life, because there is truly nothing to complain about. I get to learn, I get to explore (on a low budget, but still), I get to be with people I care about, I eat well, and I have a nice roof over my head. Things I have in my life are still just dreams to some people, and I try to remind myself that constantly.

That doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated, lost, and depressed-because I most certainly do. You see, I know I have great things to be thankful for, but I just feel so trapped in a stage of my life that sometimes I feel as if I’m not even living.

The past year I have been stuck as a grad student, stuck on the same budget, stuck being slave to professors-both in turning in papers, and grading undergraduate work for them-stuck as a working student at a barn, stuck in San Antonio, stuck in one stage of a relationship, and yet I’m still getting older without any ability of my life to move forward at the moment-or for another year.

It’s enough to drive me insane. I’m the type of person who constantly tries to push myself forward, and I also am the type of person who embraces new challenges, and new adventures. But the past year has been nothing but stagnant. It’s driven me to emotional breakdowns, with me wondering when I’m finally going to be able to do something worthwhile with a career, and wondering when I can finally get to go on all those adventures I’ve been constantly dreaming about.

Even though I know, or, hope, that in the end this grad degree is going to put me in a better position with getting into Law School, and one day I’ll be a lawyer-and finally get to stand up for causes and people who need someone to stand up for them…at the moment I truly feel useless and ungrateful.

Sometimes, it’s just too hard to ‘keep my head and my hopes up’, becuase my life just feels like a never-ending state of limbo. It’s almost torturous at times, because I just know it’s still going to be so long until I can finally feel ‘useful’, and even then, I don’t truly know if that will happen. What If I flunk the LSAT? What if I don’t get in to a good law school-what if no one want’s to hire me, what if I don’t get paid enough to pay off my loans? And I end up causing problems in my future marriage because of it-and if I never get to own a horse, my life-long dream since I was little? But most of all, what if I’m stuck working for people who have none of the same aspirations as me; people who just care about the money, and not about the cause? What if what I truly want to accomplish, is unaccomplishable? What if everything I’ve had to go through mentally this past year, and this next year, isn’t even worth it? What if I still fail, and then what happens?

While I should be grateful for the life I’ve been given, at the moment, I only feel unable to even live it.

 

 

A Necessary Adventure

Let’s be real. Sometimes, even if things are going relatively pretty great in life, we all need a break from it. Or, maybe ‘life’ isn’t exactly what we need a break from, but our own mentality about it.

Last weekend, I took a necessary adventure with my crew to the wonderful wizarding world of Harry Potter-and let me tell you, I’ve been there twice already, but that world never fails to just get my mind back in the right place again.

My ‘crew’ are my best friends, Madeline and Megan. A Hufflepuff and a Syltherin, mind you. Our squad gets a bit chaotic at times, since we have all different personalities-but yet, we all actually have the same ideas and values, we just show them in different ways.

I think that’s one of the great things about Harry Potter, we all seem so different than each other at times, but something about HP reminds us that when it comes down to the important things, we’re not different at all. That’s probably the greatest reminder that HP can give us: especially in times when the world seems to try and divide us into ‘deaths eaters’ and ‘good people’.

In my line of study, (politics and law), and in this time in the United States, I honestly feel like Harry in the Order of the Pheonix. I just feel so angry at everyone. I don’t understand how the U.S. Could have let itself get into this situation. I feel so frustrated at the lies and the incompetence of the White House, I get angry at my own family for falling for it, I get angry at politicians who continue to divide us in ‘left’ and ‘right’ in order to keep control (seriously, I study political tactics along with my focus on the judiciary-no political party cares about you, they only care for your vote), I get furious at the denial of evidence in order to confuse the mass public, I feel enraged when basically Dolores Umbridge herself is about t0 be appointed secretary of education, and I fume at the blindness of so many at the warning signs of this administration.

The constant day in, day out, of learning the depths of the political world, and the lack of me being able to do anything about it at the moment, threw my mentality into a torment of dispair. I began to have break downs because I so badly just want to be able to do something worthwhile; but this world constantly reminds me of how even when people do try to do what is right, they are constantly defeated.

And, as silly as it sounds, Harry Potter is a story of much of the same feelings that I’m going through right now. And many of the people I talked to over the weekend, and people I’ve met through Harry Potter, and especially my best friends, all are experiencing very similar problems.

Regardless of our different areas of study, or jobs, we all want to be helping the world, in some sort of fashion, and sadly we all constantly are reminded of how tremendously difficult of a task that can be at times.

But, we’re also reminded that there are other people out there having the same troubles,  the same fears, and the same hopes. It’s truly remarkable to know how many people are actually just like you, in the important ways.

That people just like you also feel defeated, that people just like you want to see this world change for the better, and people just like you won’t back down no matter how frustrating or discouraging the situation. That people out there, that are no different than you, are trying to stand up for what’s right, even when everyone tells them to sit down.

So I needed this adventure, because I needed a reminder of what’s important. My best friends, our love and understanding of each other, and our similarities in our hopes and fears all helped me and my mentality return to a better place. And it’s thanks to the world of Harry Potter as well, in reminding us to come together when the world is trying to divide us apart.