Lately I don't seem to have a clear picture of myself. Most of the ways I defined myself in the past no longer seem to apply.
I always used to be the exceedingly young, brilliant teacher's pet. Anymore, that's not so much the case. Though I still have a good head on my shoulders, I'm not as young as I once was and I have not kept as much of an edge on everyone else as I used to have.
I used to be the Chicago girl, the one who would get to the city as soon as possible, no matter what the cost. That definition was broken down, spectacularly so, a few months ago (more on that in a bit).
I used to be (depending on which "era" I was in) the radio girl, the library girl, the drama girl, the piano girl, the physics girl, the funny girl, the quiet girl, the adventurous girl, the math girl . . . and yet, none of those things seem quite right any more.
After graduating from community college, I took a year off to travel, an experience that has no doubt broadened my horizons and given gifts that I will cherish the rest of my life. But it did take away my academic edge of being years ahead of everyone else I knew.
And then, six months ago, I tried to move out to Chicago, the city of my dreams, and the result was a failure of epic proportions. Every notion of who I was, who I could be, and who other people were was destroyed more completely than I ever could have predicted.
Somehow I don't feel I've really recovered from that disaster completely, and I've only spent my days either on damage control to maintain the vital systems, or picking up the pieces of who I was and trying to glue them together into who I used to be. Probably, I should just let them lie and start from scratch. In the end, I'm sure that would be better, but it is hard to have your goals broken down further than you ever thought they'd go, and then push yourself to strip them down even further.
What it will take to finally make me do this, I don't know. And the even harder question remains, of HOW? How do you toss out everything you thought you knew about yourself, and then force yourself to keep going? When do you know you've reached the core of yourself, the essence of who you are, and then build upon that?
4 comments:
Questions, have you decided that Chicago is not what you want? I certainly don't know what happened but it sounds like the school/people that you met were horrible. There are other wonderful schools in Chicago. I asked a few people in the Chicago area about Roosevelt over the summer because I had never heard of it, and they basically said that you shouldn't go there if you have the resources to go somewhere/anywhere else. They pretty much predicted what you experienced. But that being said, they are incredibly happy/successful students/scholars in Chicago and loving the city. So was it the school that was a let-down, or the city itself?
-Lauren
(Sorry that posted as Shannon earlier, I was signed into my lab's google account.)
Lol, I was wondering who on earth "Shannon" was.
I definitely still want to go to Chicago. While I was there, the city was as great as ever, but the school/people were terrible. I'm hoping that once I'm done at Cedar Crest I can find a (good) school in Chicago to go to for Masters work.
I guess what really changed was this obsession I had with Chicago. I still want to go there, but before, that was my goal with absolutely no consideration of how good the school really was, if the degree program really "fit" me, etc. Now I'm trying to figure out the best way to accomplish my goal of getting to Chicago, without compromising on education/sanity.
PS. In hindsight, I probably could have deduced that Roosevelt was going to be as crappy as it turned out to be (and as your friends said it is), but I kind of turned a blind eye to the warnings, as I just wanted to get to Chicago ASAP.
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