This entry started off as a reflective assignment for my Composition Theory class. After finishing it, I realized that it was really meant for here. I turned it in anyway...
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I’ve started to sleep with the light on again. I concluded a while ago that my fear of the dark is directly proportional to the amount of stress in my life. At this point, I’m apprehensive about getting up and going to the bathroom because of the five seconds of insufferable blackness that separates my room and the light switch. I’m not quite sure if that constitutes as some form of social commentary; I’m completely comfortable in my skin, but at times, I fee like it hinders other’s ability to be naturally comfortable with me. So, most of the time, I feel like a beached whale, surrounded by an ocean of well-intentioned individuals. The glaring differences make it hard to see much else, and I can’t help but feel sorry for them. I know that that’s an ironic concept; it both is and isn’t their fault that I grew up in a subdivision of their discursive existence. The similarities are atrociously intriguing, but the differences have a way of putting everything into perpetual perspective. Here I am, creating the beginnings of what might prove to be a ritualistic purging of the non-sequential, expressive, deceitfully telling writing that has marked the communicative growth I have experienced over the years, and all I can think about is the idea that this soul-letting will work to foster a base disconnectedness that will enable me to write more like an academic. I can’t think of anything more classically pathetic.
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I miss the days when I was certain about things; the days when I was secure. Now I seem to exist in a continual state of intellectual disarray. I don’t trust the viability of my own thoughts, and I can’t help but think that this path is one big conspiracy to make me a functioning alcoholic. I never drank as much as I have since I’ve been here, and it’s only been about a month. Talk about your gateway drugs. I’m convinced that the desire to pursue a life in academia is the most significant social anathema in existence. I was already a recluse, and even I have my reservations. (As a side note, that was not initially meant to be a punny reference to the current state of Native-American sovereign territories.) All this leaves me wondering if my tangential, markedly interconnect trains of though will, at some point, come barreling toward each other in what is sure to be the final reckoning of my intellectual existential being. I mean, will I ever be able to avoid the cerebral overload that comes with the assimilation of massive amounts of (oft- disparaging) case studies on human exigency (know, more affectionately, as literature)? For—to hijack, resituate and ironize an oft quoted scripture—my cup runneth over as it is.
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The other day, I genuinely wept while reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Monkingbird, and I’ve not been alright sense. Looking the way I do, being the way I am, feeling the way I feel, I can’t help but hurt when humanity trades in its individually inspired brilliance for a work-bee like reliance on mob mentality. We possess tools that both damn and save us, and I am torn to pieces by the price we each have to pay for misguided, oft-violent, centralization of human intellectual capital. We chant, “I am legion” as we slaughter each other by the millions, all for a frustrated desire to connect with ourselves and, by extension, each other. It hurts, and the books only serve to concretize the inner turmoil that breeds such contemptible behavior. They give me hope; they leave me in despair. Still, I profess literature, and I must press on. I’m just at a loss for what I’m supposed to do with these feelings. “I could stand a little help.”
