I have no story to inspire or cause to champion; I can only offer myself, as I am right now, sporadic thoughts and all. I’m tiptoeing at the edge of twenty-one, a little over half way through my architectural undergrad, attempting to relish in the present because thinking of the past makes me feel too embarrassed and thinking of the future makes me feel too anxious.
I don’t know if receiving the listserve notice and having my first kiss on the same day is a coincidence. I almost want to say that it’s like some sort of cosmic sign that this day is a really, really significant one. But then again, maybe it’s not.
I’ve been living a sort of nomadic life style recently, living in cities around the world so incredible that I could liken my life (however undeservedly and pretentious sounding) to fiction. I have been travelling through this amazing life only to return to my sleepy, industrial university city every four months. As much as everyone complains about being here, I kind of love it in the way that one loves a childhood blanket – the familiarity upon returning is comforting. That being said, I do have times where I am overwhelmed by my educational frustrations here and feel compelled to return to my parent’s suburban house just to escape it all (however suffocating going back to that small town may be – that’s another thought all together).
Sometimes I feel so incredibly lucky to have these opportunities placed in front of me that I want to learn everything there is to know about anything relating to architecture and absorb everything and work so hard at this thing that I supposedly love so much that I don’t even ever want to sleep. And yet at other times, I just want to crawl in to bed and sleep away the days because I feel that my dreams are more satisfactory than my daily life. I am constantly fluctuating between feeling exceptionally lonely and feeling extremely loved. I am having trouble separating my profession and education from my personal feelings and find myself letting them dictate each other’s respective successes and failures. A counselor recently told me that I am having the symptoms of “acute depression”. This scared the fucking hell out of me.
A roommate commented on how up and down I’ve been recently, and I feel so guilty to place my own tribulations on people that I so deeply care about. Sometimes I just want to hide away from everyone so they won’t have to feel burdened by this side of me.
I was with my class in Chicago last June when I received the news that my grandmother, or more affectionately, “Bub”, had suddenly passed away. While my classmates were loaded onto the bus behind us, I bawled in my friend’s arms as he held me and after having shown him some clothes that I bought a few days prior, he said, “I’m so sad to see you crying in your new dress”. For whatever reason, this will always stick with me.
Anyway, it’s quite strange that this is my biggest audience to date, and it’s even stranger that you’re all behind a computer, 99% of whom I will never know anything about. This has been quite hard to write for me, knowing that this isn’t completely anonymous. A handful of my friends will be reading this, and will probably shortly be asking if “I’m okay”. I guess, right now… I am and I’m not. But aren’t we all?
Danielle
[email protected]
Canada