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I would like to interrupt my usual doom and gloom blog posts to make an important announcement:
I’ve dropped a major.
***
Thursday morning I was filled with anticipation. While sitting in my Women in Psychology class I momentarily lapsed my concentration to day dream about the strides I’d made in my rewrite on the paper I had failed in my Creative Writing Seminar. I was so excited. I had worked so hard finding where I went wrong, reading and re-reading the articles and excepts I have already read and re-read for the first edition of my paper. The failing grade of 66% was going to disappear, forever. It would be a faint memory… instead I woke up from this fantasy to a darker and more twisted reality. Not only did I have to sit through nearly and hour of Nazi Propaganda as an example of cinematographic genius. I do not a practicing Judaism, but my last name is Klutz and my German great grandparents arrived in America before WWII erupted, carrying Russian passports (you connect the dots). Far behind the violins playing Wagner, I could faintly hear the still conscious skeletal remains of beautiful souls screaming for their bodies to be spared. Millions of people died because some psycho-sociopath had severe daddy issues and didn’t get into art school. It made me realize something though… I’m lucky, because I’m here.
***
My paper revision was handed back to me with a 79% and some very cryptic scribble.
***
One of my numerous mentors told me last semester that I am afraid of too many things. I’ll admit that I am deathly afraid of failure. I’m not one of those people who are afraid of failure, but have never experienced it. I am afraid of failure, because in so many aspects of my life I have failed. I failed/dropped out of my first university and now I have to worry about whether or not that is going to prevent me from getting into an amazing graduate study program. I’ve failed my parents, my brother, my family, friends, mentors, and former lovers in a downward spiral filled with self-loathing, lack of self worth, and uncontrolled substance abuse. I get anxiety and physically ill when I think back on the fragments of memory my brain bothered to record. I burned a lot of bridges and alienated myself from a lot of people. Some of the friendships are still there in the most superficial form: Facebook friends. I am really blessed that a few haven’t abandoned me or are superficial, but things have changed. I want to apologize, but a lot of time has passed. Many of these people have passed me in so many ways. Even the most meaningless “Hi, how are you?” messages to them are ignored. They’re all still friends and I am on the outside looking in. It isn’t too dreary on this side of the window, so I’ve never bothered to ask for reentry. I’ve always thought the apologies would make for better laughs amongst themselves, with their hands spilling fancy drinks while laugh. Instead of considering a legitimate potential pardon based on my apology. That image hurts.
***
That sick, uncomfortable, nauseating, anxious throb where you feel as if your heart is being pulled out of your chest and being shoved back down your throat. I feel that when I think of my past, when I think of my old friends, and I’ve felt that everyday in this Creative Writing Seminar. I felt it every time I sat down to do the homework, during the lectures, I felt it when I had a 66% on the first draft and my roommate was so terrified of my reaction that she gave me nerve pills. It felt worse than the girl (woman now) who used to be mistaken as my twin stopped replying to my messages -not that I blame her. That 79% felt like the biggest bitch-slap I’ve ever had. Trust me, I’ve had a few literal and figurative ones in my time. This hurt worse than all of them combined.
***
Since returning to school, I’ve had two “B”s. Both have been in math and considering that I failed math all the way through high school, I’m pretty damn proud of myself for pulling “B”s in college. I’m tiding up the lose ends of my undergraduate requirements and finding out the few last classes I need to take. I am narrowing down schools and programs to apply for MA/PhD and/ or MFA programs. This class was becoming a problem. I was warned about this class and this professor, but graduation and grad school were so close I could almost taste them. I spent approximately 12 plus of my 15 studying hours a week on this class. I also have three other classes. All of them I have 95% or above in, while being able to dedicate almost no time to them. I am not terribly good at math, but mathematically speaking we have a problem here.
In talking to my advisers from two out of my three programs -because no one would give me the time of day in the Creative Writing program- I learned that most of courses I still lacked were from the Creative Writing department. While trying to rig a schedule together, which when you are in upper level classes is like trying to put Jenga pieces into a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, because there are less choices. Try rigging a schedule to avoid a certain person… it wasn’t happening. This meant I would have to delay my graduation by a semester, possibly a year.
***
I am going to be twenty-seven in April.
***
I sat through my next class and cried behind my book. I’m not sure if I was crying about my past or my present, but I know I hate crying in front of other people. It just pisses me off. I hate looking vulnerable. I hate feeling vulnerable ever more. The professor was lecturing about never being able to go home, the main characters in post-modern literature can never go home. I cried harder, because I knew he was right. At that moment I wanted to go home, but I wasn’t entirely sure exactly where that was.
***
We are living a post-modern world (this can be argued by my roommates and literary critics) and I am a post-modern girl.
***
The place I called home for fourteen, nearly fifteen years, will be on the market in a few months. My parents are moving back to the lower-48. All the belongings, every trace that we ever existed there, will be packed up and shipped out. The neighbors will remember for awhile, but eventually they’ll be gone too. I signed the inside of my closet when I was nine. It was the day we moved in. I knew that someday, that the signature would be the only part of me left there. It would remember me and I would remember it.
***
I’ve felt like I’ve been on the cusp of failure since I’ve move back here. I’ve felt at the mercy of everyone else’s agenda, except for my own. I had one mission: to get an undergraduate degree and move on to my masters. Others didn’t seem to agree with me. I have learned through this trial-and-error experience that sometimes people’s best intentions for others are often their worst intentions. My mentor is right though, I have to stop fearing the failures of my past.
I currently live in an apartment with friends, people my own age, who are not related to me by blood and therefore can pretend to have claim or dominion over my person. They don’t plague me with their good intentions or their my-way-or-the-highway expectations. My roommates are nerds, like myself, whom I wouldn’t frustrate by knowing and shouting the answers to Jeopardy to, because if we had cable they’d be right there with me. I don’t have to explain M-Theory because of a comment made in the first two minutes of the Big Bang Theory and miss the rest of the show, because my roommates both understand M-Theory and they’ve seen all the episodes of the Big Bang Theory. I finally have a car that is younger than my 22 year old brother. I have a college job that I can stomach… things aren’t really so bad.
***
Then why wasn’t I okay?
***
There is a moment that we will have in many relationships through the course of our lives when we realize that things just aren’t working out. Honestly, I don’t want my relationships to be about poetry. Just.about.poetry. I don’t want to feel like a failure, but I don’t want to admit failure either. So somewhere between uttering “it isn’t you its me.” Or blame placing and finger pointing the classic “it isn’t me it’s you.” We all know that human nature’s favorite animal is the scapegoat… but there’s no blame to be placed here…
***
By the way, David and I are just fine. Thank you.
***
I walked over to the financial aid office. In the end, it was ultimately their decision. I have passed by these ladies nearly everyday for two years and now we would have human interaction. Shaking, I passed my school identification over to the first available representative and sobbed: “I need to drop a class. How will this affect my financial aid now and in the future?” The lady looked horror-stricken and sorry at the same time. She assured me that my record was surprisingly beautiful, the best that she has seen in quite awhile, and that everything will be just fine. I will have to pay for the class, but it is already paid for and everything will be just fine.
***
Maybe it will, maybe it won’t
***
The important thing is that I feel fine now, better, not perfect, but fine. I don’t feel like I’m losing grasp of my sanity. My soul is slowly reentering my body after being sucked out for the past eight weeks. I don’t feel sick all of the time and I don’t feel like sleeping all day, every day. Tomorrow will be interesting. I’ll have a break between classes. I’ll be able to read and to concentrate on my other classes, which I feel I’ve been robbed most of the pleasure of. Hopefully there is still enough time in the semester to get something out of them, besides just a decent grade. I’ve dropped the class and the major. The program isn’t what I want. I write poetry, but I don’t think that my poetry is exceptionally good. I want to write fiction, I am currently interested in creative non-fiction. Two things that the remaining staff within the program do not seem to care much about. My peers have well wished me, they understand. Former mentors have agreed that the situation and the program are not for me. Nothing worth paying a 12% interest rate on in my future. A novelist and professor in an MFA program that I am interested in even assured me that I made a wise decision by dropping the program.
That sadistic side of myself that keeps telling myself that I deserve all the bad things that come my way, that it is my karma. She has a sock in it now. I hear muffled groans somewhere in the back of my head, but I’ve learned to drown her out, like I have all the other naysayers. I feel good about leaving the class and the program, actually. Part of me is still sad that I no longer have the gumption to shine through torture, part of me is really happy that I am over that crap. I felt like a Jenga piece trying to make a niche for myself in a jigsaw puzzle. It doesn’t work.