I Promise this isn't about what you think it's about.

Sometimes it's hard sticking to the decisions - the promises - you make for yourself. It's enough to make me wonder why we even make commitments in the first place. Why do we decide to do anything for a longer period of time than the present? Why, after all the failed attempts at longevity, do we still make promises? What good can really come from it?

Are we motivated by some inflated sense of self righteousness? Is it the lingering notion of our eventual demise?

Why do we love?
Why do we hate?

Why is it that the promises we make always seem to cause the distinction between the two?

So often it seems like we let the logistics of human life get in the way of human life. I wish that I was one of those people who could turn off their brain for a little while and just enjoy life. But my thoughts and my promises always get in the way. And yet, for some reason, I keep making them.



*yes, I am well aware that this probably makes zero sense to anyone but me. 

One More Time For Emphasis

Things are starting to get down to the wire. It seems like most of the people who have tried to "guide" me through college have all been wrong: getting in as a transfer student is easy, figuring everything else out is the hard part. I'm going from knowing everything like the back of my hand, to knowing nothing, but I'm still trying to plan and prepare for the year like I do. I'm panicking that I'll miss sending in something, or that I'll find out I still have a ton of lower division work I have to do, or that - you know - I'll just fail at life.

Despite all of this fear and insecurity at my abilities in what people have over and over again told me is my field, (where are you now, community college teachers?) I am so excited to explore my major. UCI offers two emphasises in English, which basically means you take a couple extra classes to develop you skills in a specific area of English. The two offered are creative writing and literary journalism, and in my mind, the two are distinctly intriguing but also have their downfalls.

I feel like you can't be an English major and not consider creative writing as the end goal of your career, and I know that being in the program would push me - hard. But looking at the program's website makes me more fearful than excited. It looks intense, strict, competitive - exactly the kind of thing that I'm afraid would unleash my doubts in my ability and cause me to become a writing zombie - just going and going, praying that I get somewhere. Not to mention, coming up with a complete idea for a fiction story, even in my head, has eluded me. I can always get the beginning, but never the end.

Literary journalism is a little less clear cut, but from what I can gather it is essentially writing factual articles on a more personal and thoughtful level, existing on a different level than typical journalism. This sounds more like where my current writing style lies, but I also feel like I might find the field to restrictive to the kind of writing I want to do. Focused more on facts than on feeling, more on a story than the image -the emotion- that the story creates.

All the research that I've been attempting to do results in a frozen computer from the twenty Internet windows open, and more questions than answers. I guess I'll just have to hope that the match for both my talents and my desires finds me.

Or, you know, that my counselor is the bomb diggity.

College

By the end of the month, I will have made my decision. By the end of the month, my college admission confirmation is due. I envy people who have no shame or doubt about moving into a new role in life, but now more than ever I find myself conflicted. Maybe it's the unfaltering concept of the unknown that holds me back; the absolute blindness of not knowing if or where I'll be happy, or how my units will transfer. Not knowing if I'll make friends, or be forgotten by my old ones, or be constantly homesick. Not knowing if I will thrive on my own and living off of top ramen, or be constantly working, or fall to the pressure and guilt of my job.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I don't know what it is that I'm looking for. One path tantalizes me with the possibility of restoring everything that I once loved about my life - all of those cold evenings that have been lumped together in my mind as one grand memory of what contentment felt like. That feeling has so long been forgotten, that I'm not even sure if I will recognize it again, or have the courage  to chase after it, or even want it at all.

Another path offers a new start, in a new place - where the potential for happiness is great, but the potential for catastrophe is greater.Would I even be able to pull off what I've so long been searching for? Will it be what I expected? Am I even capable of experiencing the all too romanticized college experience? Or would it change me, like so many others I used to know? Will the person I've fought to become and strive to be fall away? Am I strong enough?

The final path offers beauty, and freedom. But I know that it would also allow my tendency to turn inward to become all consuming. From that point, there is no turning back.

In my head, I keep playing back something an old teacher once said: once you go, there is no coming back. Nothing you can do will change that. It is mirrored with my own precaution. Two years are gone. You don't have time to not get it right.

Even as I write this, I can hear you scoffing. I really am envious of how easy it is for you. My mind is the best thing I've got, but it can sometimes be the worst.

I really can't be expected to focus on pilgrim lit. when I'm in this frame of mind.