Or maybe you forgot I told you that.
...Or maybe I didn't tell you that. Although I could have sworn I did.
My point is that I'm a few weeks into classes and the amount of outside-class work that I have to do for art is really making it hard for me to adjust to everything. I'm not used to having projects to do on my own time that take hours of attention and need to be done somewhere other than my room.
I like it, don't get me wrong. It's just... art. Every day. For hours. As an English major who hasn't taken an art class since elementary school, I'm slightly intimidated. It's like I've just been accepted into a super secret club that only plays Mao (have you ever played that game?) and I'm supposed to try and figure out the rules and win the game before I graduate in the spring.
Oh yeah, I don't know if I've told you that, either. I graduate this coming spring.
A part of me is like
but the other part of me is clutching textbooks to my chest and saying "I'll never let go, Norton Anthology, I'll never let go."
I know, I know. This is natural. All soon-to-graduate college students are afraid of what comes after college, as they should rightfully be. Blah blah blah. But I'm still feeling these feelings and knowing that it'll only get worse the longer I stay here, and I have to try to keep my head above 18 credits and a job and an internship and extracurricular activities and church and friends and whatever else comes into my life this semester. And I'm a person who really likes wallowing in feelings. Really.
I'm also turning twenty-one in a few months, which isn't as big of a deal to Mormons as it is to the rest of America, mainly because we don't drink. At least, I don't. But it does mean I get my big girl license and another year on my life, another memoryful adventure in the delicious world of Dain. I'm sure it means other things, but I can't think of them.
Sometimes I get these feelings that don't make sense. That's not to say that I'm a completely logical person and everything makes sense usually, but when I get a case of The Feels it doesn't leave for a long time. Maybe it's this merging of childhood and impending adulthood that's making my life seem so warped and small. I'm questioning my identity, my morality, my abilities, my future. It gets me down sometimes, the way that I know so little about my past, present, and future life on this earth.
Again, this is normal. I can hear my mother comforting me in her therapist voice with those words right now. This is the state that I am in. Everything is being questioned because I'm suddenly faced with the fact that there will be a time outside of school, that thing I've been doing for the past 15 years, when it's just me and my job/grad school/apartment/town house/dog/postage stamp lawn. And who will I be? What will I do? I feel like I need these answers right now, but I don't.
So that's what I'm doing right now. I'm trying to adopt a notion from Socrates: I only know that I know nothing. Knowing nothing is maybe the most frightening thing that can happen to a person, but it's also the most delicious. Conceding that I don't know anything, nor do I need to, is bold. It's frighteningly brave. It is accepting that you're not going to be right all the time. That mistakes will happen, and failures will threaten to drag you down.
I'm trying to be myself: Delicious Dain. To be strong enough that I can know how small and yet prolific my life has been and will be. That whatever road I end up taking will be the right one, because I'm going to work at it until I get it right.
And that's it.
"Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner
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