53 Days Away

I've found myself to be incredibly anti-social this semester. I don't choose to not hang out, but I have found a certain nagging indifference when social activities are presented to me. As senior year winds down, I am confronted with the loss of stability. College is a zone of uninhibited comfort. Seniors can feel this comfort dissipate with every friend's job acceptance and career move. Other students who we have felt better than suddenly seem to be making the strides that we had wished to see ourselves take. Am I unprepared for my future, or are other students making me look bad?

Senioritis is real. The same indifference that plagues social life has infiltrated my classes as well. Maybe essays have become part of the robotic student process. The romanticized essays of high school AP classes and freshman year English classes have now become the day-in, day-out regurgitations of the senior machine. It's easy to feel like you're going through the motions in life when your college academic career has been a series of tweaks to essay writing void of any spirit but full of juxtaposed paragraphs in text books. That's not to say that all essays are BS, but it is easy to replace the stress of 'proper essay' writing with the lack luster professor-approved, formulaic, "easy-way-out".

And it's a slippery slope. In seminar class, an area of unabashed free speech, seniors fail to engage material to a level that sparks others' interest. We just want to leave, and yet not. You can cut the senior tension with a knife. Tension causes irrationality and irrationality causes widespread senior panic. We have all been trained to be productive members of society and yet we fail to see our own potential in light of other's successes. Every day feels like a day I should have capitalized on, and yet, maybe I'm supposed to be here right now.

18 years in a row of school. I feel that my decision, although maybe forced, to take a year off may be the best thing that could have happened to me at this point in my life. A chance to re-root in the comforts of irreplaceable old friends and family may provide me with the vigor required to get my money's worth out of graduate school. I am never void of a plan, just often void of direction.

I believe in the power of unseen pathways clouded by conventional means of goal realization. I believe in my power to remain myself despite the growing fears of failure. I believe that my actions yesterday have directed me to today and that today is a good place to be. I believe that I will find a way to actualize my potential in life. Despite the apparent instant success of peers and the obvious direction laid out for others, I refuse to compare myself to their standards of success.
I will graduate.
I will loose weight.
I will reconnect.
I will deviate from the routine motions of college life.