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2003-08-14
3:01 p.m.
Oh my god.
Imagine that this moment, instead of being written words, is just one long, drawn-out sigh of absolute release. This is the moment when the anxiety of a tremendously strenuous summer full of a full-time job and two extra classes comes to a close.
Tuesday afternoon, I turned in the final revision for my fiction class. Yesterday, I sat for three hours writing about the Enlightenment for my final exam in the other class. For the entire week leading up to the exam, I did nothing but study and freak out about it. No matter how many times I opened the material to study, all I could think was, “I’m an idiot. I know nothing.”
But now, it’s over.
Thank god. I have been an insuperable force of nervous energy for the past eight weeks. The medication didn’t help. The completion of material didn’t help. Drinking didn’t help. Nothing helped to make the anxiety of these classes go away, but they’re over now and I took the day off work to reward myself.
Dammit, I deserve it.
It feels so good to be writing in my journal again. This might be a good time to apologize for my last entry. I was drunk, frustrated, nervous, and angry. I should not have publicly berated my friends and I apologize to them for doing it. I am an idiot.
See, I told you: I’m an idiot.
In any case, the thought of writing much for my journal over the past several weeks has seemed like an utter impossibility. Any moment not spent working or studying could not have been spent in any way other than sleeping. The fact that I ever found time to get drunk and write that one entry shows only that I was down to the last bit of energy I had to withstand the torture.
And now it’s done.
I have to say, although I didn’t really enjoy my classes this summer, I am infinitely glad that I took them. My fiction class was interesting because I got to listen to people’s reactions to my writing. The other class was pure hell. It was called “The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self.” I told that to someone yesterday and he said, “I’m already confused.”
Me too.
Talk about confusing the students, that class was nothing but propaganda from the mouth of a scholar who knows too much about the topic and thinks he can teach it to people in seven weeks time even if they’ve never read any of the writers before. For me, it was all new material. And there was so damn MUCH material that it was seriously out of hand.
And once again, all I can think is, “Thank god it’s over.”
With any luck, I am now three-tenths of the way to a Masters degree. You know, it’s amazing. All this is going on in my life, and somewhere way in the back of my mind is the recurring thought, “I’m going to die by November 17th.” Since I’m so busy, I barely have time to think about it, but the thought is still there. I think it speaks volumes to my psychiatric treatment to realize that, although the thought is still there, it doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t obsess about it. I haven’t given up the pursuit of a Masters degree and the completion of my novel even though I think I may die within three months.
Maybe I’m wrong.
If my twenty-sixth birthday comes and goes and I’m still alive, I will have to seriously revamp my entire understanding of the universe. It’s already a testament to the fact that I’m somewhat better than I used to be if I can even bear the thought that I might be wrong about dying by the age of twenty-six. And it occurs to me that perhaps it was never really the thought that I was GOING to die by the age of twenty-six but rather that I WANTED to die by the age of twenty-six.
I wanted to die by twenty-six because I never wanted to outgrow youth. I pinpointed twenty-six as the year that my youth would be absolutely in the past. I thought life must surely end by that time because anything one could do that was any use in life would have to have been done by twenty-six.
But it seems to me now that I’m just beginning to see what I want to do.
