Minor currents

I cupped my hands over the mouth of my mug of hot tea so that only an opening remained for the steam to escape. It curled in a concentrated column of long, silken wisps, occasionally pinwheeling as it fled into the air, backlit by my desk lamp; with even the slightest breath from me it would fragment ruthlessly– so I held my breath for as long as I could until necessity forced me to expel it from my lungs in a sudden exhale more cataclysmic to the ribbons of steam than constant minor breaths, but preserving them for a longer time. When I finally pulled my hands away from the mug, they glistened with blueberry-pomegranate-white condensation.

This is what I have done for five minutes instead of studying for my geochemistry exam in less than an hour and a half, for which I remain unprepared.

Having cooled slightly, the steam now wafts at a more leisurely pace unlike that of the thoughts in my head, accelerating in panic as the countdown dwindles.

Life is not bad, though. And writing is like coming home.

Boomerang

It’s been a while since my last post, but here, I am come, returning after already having been awake for four hours this morning owing to jet lag. Just last week, I was across the Atlantic for the first time. And now that the constant high of that experience, the energy strung on a line over the course of the week, has run its natural course, I am subdued.

Why haven’t I posted in a while? I’m not sure. This is my reservoir for scattered, flighty thoughts that somehow still run deep.^ Maybe I’ve been having a superficial stint, as I am wont to do, more extensive than most I experience on a normal basis. Maybe I’m content enough with my life to be more mentally placid, and don’t require this outlet as frequently.

(right, and I’m a card-carrying evangelical Christian, too.)

The latter half of that sentence, perhaps, has some measure of truth. I may not require this outlet as frequently, but that may only be because I’m channeling my nervous energy elsewhere– music projects are the prime distractor for me, from everything of import and anything of value.

Strange, that my more adult musical ambitions are expressions of more child-like dreams and childish yearning.

The words now flow, and rapidly, in a supple stream with only a minor echo of the simultaneous backtracking I allow as I write, skipping back and forth, editing my words as I go.

This and the above were two of the only lines inserted after words were written below them.*

—

Postscript

As a side note, almost an addendum to the previous post– I think that learning to bite one’s tongue is one of the more significant marks of maturity. When we’re children, we let words flow freely, unconstrained by society and propriety. We soon learn to obey and observe them, if not to occasionally flout them.

But flouting society’s constraints is one thing. Learning to hold back unnecessary or hurtful words out of consideration for another person’s reaction– not just society-dictated reactions, but personal feelings and sentiment– isn’t straightforward, because people often don’t consider how their words might affect the person they’re aimed at. When they are considered, often the intention is malicious or self-serving– flattery, malicious rumours, the list goes on. Considering a possible reply or comment and refraining from saying it after one realizes that the person may be hurt?

How long does it take for people to learn that, if ever?

It’s very, very tempting to lash out, though. But as I kept myself from pointing out to one friend who’s been depressed lately over a former friend of hers– who, all her close friends have pointed out, was the guilty party in their falling out–  that her withdrawal from her friends and her shutting me out were more painful to me than anything, that she would draw away from the friends who did care about her over one who didn’t even though we were all sincerely distressed by her sadness and my empathetic tendencies caused me to feel frustrated and helpless, I realized that she’d been hurt enough without me making her feel more guilty– or causing her to lash out defensively. She’ll learn in time, and even if she doesn’t, there’s no use making more out of a situation than there is.

One thing that only age brings: experience. I’ve been in her place before, and her experience also serves to remind me to take my sundered friendships less seriously and treasure the ones I do have.

As always, the other realization that comes with growth– you really can’t help someone who isn’t open to or doesn’t want help.

When and how do people learn these things? How, after my friends and I discussed articles about socially stunted populations in other major countries, do we come to learn these things through the tiresome educational mechanism of human interaction? And how is it that we only learn them from bitter, self-experienced lessons?

It seems a wonder, when one views the cases of those who withdraw from or fail to thrive in society, that we’re functioning at all– if we actually are.

Retrograde aging

You know there’s something wrong when you overhear a conversation and the words that filter into your head are filed under a tired-sounding “I’m too old for this” with a side of “bah, girls these days”– and the conversation was between women at least twice your age. And that’s a generous estimate.

I’ve long been aware that adults aren’t transcendentally mature or wise, and that in many ways, they’re simply children with experience and slightly more age-honed tact, just as my contemporaries– still young by all rights– are already moaning about childhood nostalgia and getting old. No, you idiots, you’re not old. Suck it up. But we have moved past childhood. And are starting to edge past adolescence. So my significantly older supervisor at the group where I’m interning this summer should be significantly past adolescence, right?

Er, about that.

A former employee who moved to another state– a fairly portly middle-aged woman– came back to visit, and after pouncing on my supervisor, catch-up gossip commenced without further ado. The conversation raised my eyebrows.

“So, how’s the boy,” the woman said, drawing out the final word with the kind of intonation that keeps the sentence from being a question and instead turns it into a near-leer full of insinuations. The kind of “booooooy” that I hear from high school girls. But surely she had to be asking about my supervisor’s son (does she even have a son?) or something. Maybe her son had some sort of ongoing gossipworthy drama. Surely that tone couldn’t be–

Sluicing

There’s something to be said for therapeutic showers. Therapeutic is the word of the day, and words always come to me under the spray.

They first came to me framed in second person, in self-recriminating commentary– water sluices past the scabs, which trace the hollow of your neck and highlight invisible wrinkles with ripples of brown, like the impression that waves leave on a sandy beach– only the beach is shades of red and purple, dotted with livid pink where the ripples have already begun to flake away.

and you can’t even scrub at them, you can’t even erase this reminder; you must skirt them delicately because it hurts all the same though they no longer sting to the touch– and as if out of spite, you scrub twice as hard everywhere it is safe to, only remembering too late that you’ve cuts elsewhere. Already the cut on the inside of your elbow is scrubbed raw and pink, the scabs lost to the spray.

But as the water continued to wrap around me briefly on its journey down, already I was absently musing that second-person was all too melodramatic, and as if I weren’t already too prone to speaking to myself in my own head, I didn’t need the literary framework to make it all the more literal. And slowly, spurred onward by the knowledge that what I write is never the same as what it is in my mind, though I can see the words as I think them, as if written with pen to paper, quill to parchment as I trace the streams of consciousness like water from a showerhead…

I just let my thoughts wander without dwelling on them.

And now I feel better, if still vaguely isolated.

It’s been a dreadfully long week.

Gilded collar

For the purposes of this exercise, let’s just set aside the semantics and debates surrounding the attempts to quantify or define the concept of the word “happiness.”

Generally, I’m more than happy to make my loved ones happy, not the least of which– selfishly– is because their happiness is paramount to mine, and makes me happy as well. Every now and then, I resent the fact that my happiness is dependent on that of others.

Because at this point, there’s no making my parents happy; all of my efforts until I graduate will be aimed at attempting to mitigate the damage that’s already been wrought, to make up for how unhappy I’ve made them, and only after that can I even spare a thought for their happiness beyond alleviating-the-worry-that-I’m-a-failure-at-life.

Then again, that’s where this entire conflict springs from. For the first two full years of university, I’ve oscillated between making myself happy and doing what I think may appease my parents; I’ve moved from trying to fully please them to compromising between our wishes, but the see-saw between resentment and contrition is evident in my hopping between majors, the fluctuation of grades scattered across my unimpressive transcript, and the lowering personal standards.

The thought that I can make my parents unhappy more easily than vice versa is leaving me rather perpetually glum in the back of my mind, though outwardly I’m more or less fine. That persistent underlying stress makes me feel tense even when I’m in a good mood, and I don’t know if I can take that tenseness for two years– when, hopefully, I’ll graduate and at least assuage the fears of that not coming to pass. Dealing with it for weeks at a time is already difficult enough, and I feel relieved after each semester to feel the tension loosen after exams.

But there’s already a stiffness to my joints as I type and an almost imperceptible clenching of my stomach, a catching of my breath and a dull ache in my chest– that won’t go away no matter how much I try to relax. Stress like this isn’t good for you. It’s not the flash-fire temper of people who are quick to rouse to fury at small things like train delays; it’s almost like a pervasive dread of the future.

Because from here on out, every positive step I take– hopefully positive, assuming they will come to fruition– will be mentally backed by an upturned face, palms facing the sky in supplication, asking (pleading): is that good? will it be enough? are you proud of my progress? do you feel less ashamed of me? have you stopped hurting?

—

tl;dr: I fucked up academically and to be frank, personally feel detached from it, but am stricken by the backlash and shitstorm it’s caused for my family.

Turning leaves

I’m sitting in temporary housing listening to a quartet of girls, three of whom I don’t know and one who’s a temporary roommate of mine– and we’re discussing books. At least, they are, guests of my roommate, all theater girls, and I’m occasionally interjecting from the corner where I sit with my laptop. Aside from a brief demonstration of one of my dance props– after one of the girls had picked up the magician’s-cane-variant I own and mistaken it for a baton– to much wide-eyed appreciation, which I also appreciated, we settled onto various pieces of furniture and I kept to myself.

But the book titles being tossed around are too compelling for me to resist. A Wrinkle In Time. I hadn’t been listening to the conversation until my roommate, sitting separate from her three companions piled onto a futon in our common room, explained Wrinkle’s theory of four-dimensional space. “A Wind in the Door is the sequel– that’s good too.” “Many Waters– that’s the Noah’s Ark-type story.” “What’s the last sequel called?” “A Swiftly Tilting Planet,” I chimed in, unable to hold back. “Ah, that’s the one,” the girl returned, no expression of surprise crossing her face at my input. The titles flew, as we exchanged childhood reading loves– The Little Prince. The Handmaid’s Tale, by one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood; the girl who had suggested that book hadn’t read any of her other works, whereas I’ve read nearly all of them, and I recommended them.

Prodigal mannequin

I’m home. I guess.

“Home” is figurative; it was where I lived with my parents for the six-odd years before I started college. But I never liked the state, and experienced a jarring, stomach-churning culture shock when we moved here, having been terribly sheltered and excruciatingly naive– book smarts and single-minded academia do not a street-smart, socially savvy daughter make– so going to college was liberating, if counterproductive, considering it’s merely a different cage.

The area where I go to college is mentally my de facto return point; I suppose it ought to be “home” in that sense. I declared residency, I’ve lived there for two years. But I come back here, my bank accounts were opened here, my parents are here and I have a room in a house here.

Still, home to me is neither my temporary four-year residence nor this state I worked my ass off to flee– it kind of seems to be in a state I only spent five days in two months ago.

—

Solitaire

Normally, if I’m in a bad mood, I’ll be terribly clingy, and my people-person tendencies manifest themselves in full regalia. I’ll want to talk to people, to be around people, to feel relevant, anything but be on my own. Today, after an afternoon of listless time-killing– not even enthused by the idea of free time, or able to burn time on the Internet at the speed I can usually manage– I forced myself to trek across campus in the rain to the group of friends I often dine with, who I get along well with but– I being one and they being four, plus or minus– never do they make the trip.

Perhaps it was things like that that, perhaps it was something else, but this must be a mood of profound apathy like none other, because I do not want to be around people. I left early, tired of going through the motions of normalcy. I wasn’t brooding, and I wasn’t sad. But an absence of mood made it difficult to do anything. I talked as usual and put on a cheerful demeanor. Then I simply left.

I do not have a specific cause for this mood– not even rainy days usually have this effect– and there is no specific solution; talking about this miscellaneous “it” would be pointless. I have no desire to do anything, after the thing I most desired to do today– paint– was made impossible by some forgetful teacher or hungover student neglecting to unlock the art studio.

I don’t like this apathy, but I don’t even feel strongly about that dislike. I feel rather nonexistent. There isn’t even any self-pity or sense of abject depression underlying this; simply supreme lack of caring, seemingly reciprocated by the word. 1 + -1 = 0. It’s a very odd mood. Hopefully, it’ll wear off.

Thesaurus

It is far too late (here, the peanut gallery scoffs at my age, but for every bit of seven-year-old mental age’s delight expressed at nature is a 37-year-old’s worries about life coming to the forefront) for me to be courting the “I don’t know who I am” spiel and indeed, that’s not what I’m doing here. I’m contemplating the fact that most people define themselves through other people. It comes naturally. We have a society. It has definitions.  Some associations are unavoidable– we live in labels and neatly-stacked categories, tame and easy to understand but all too often inaccurate and misleading; they both fail to encompass the finer details of unique individuals and cause some to believe that they must mold to fit and fill those stamps.

A somewhat stream-of-consciousness exercise done at a program I once attended showed that most of my peers immediately identified themselves first by categories and demarcations such as race, religion, or family member (son-daughter-sister-brother) before moving on to more abstract analyses. Meanwhile, my entry was introspective and rife with metaphors. I defined myself in my own terms, not relevant to other people, and reading back– I find that very interesting.

Because in application and in action, I define myself very much by other people. I am a daughter struggling to reconcile her ever-present duties with her transient desires; I am a lover trying to determine where her life path fits; I am a friend and sister who occasionally fails miserably at her role but tries; I am a student, dreamer, pragmatist, realist, whimsical bundle of quirks, trailing off into abstract descriptions that don’t have to do with other people.