Ugh. I feel like this has been my worst semester yet. Not in terms of grades, or in terms of social life, or even in terms of workload, but just…in terms of my classes. Classes, and just school in general.
Here’s what I’ve figured out. My best, most enjoyable classes are the ones that really push me, and the most miserable classes are ALWAYS the ones that are too easy. If it doesn’t help me to learn and grow, if it doesn’t change my perspective, if it doesn’t open new doors of knowledge to me, I hate it. All the rote things that we do for grades–tests, papers, homework, attendance quizzes, extra credit assignments, all that stuff–if it’s all for the grade’s sake, I just go crazy. I can’t stand it. And if it’s all about memorizing data and spitting it back like a machine, I feel like I’m going to lose it.
Well, that’s the way I’ve basically felt all semester. To make it worse, all of my classes overlapped to the point where it started to feel like I was listening to exactly the same lecture over and over again. When that happens, what little there is about the subject that is interesting just seems to dissipate.
I can work really hard when I have the motivation. When I’m doing something that I love, I can really accomplish some amazing things. But when I don’t have the motivation…it’s almost impossible to bring myself to sit down and do it.
That’s basically been the story of this semester: trudging through day after day of work, pushing myself to do things that I didn’t really want to do. I suppose I did a good job of it…but it was very draining. It took almost as much work just to force myself to sit down and focus as it did to actually do the work. As a result, even though the workload wasn’t particularly hard or particularly exhausting, I never felt that I had the time to do what I wanted to do.
I suppose it would be immature to say “I’m not going to do what I don’t want to do,” but at the same time, life is too short not to get out and have fun. If you’re doing what you love, you can have fun and work hard at the same time. Like this Earth, I don’t have an inexhaustible supply of energy. I need to find and develop renewable resources–the things I love to do, the things that engage my imagination and passions and really energize me–and build my life on those. I wouldn’t even care living poor, so long as all my needs were supplied. I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and utterly burned out.
Interestingly enough, because of this crappy semester, I am more motivated than ever to break into publishing and get paid full time for writing novels. My plans haven’t changed yet, but now I want, more than ever, to actually make a living doing this stuff. Most of my inhibitions now are gone, it’s just…well, that first step. It’s pretty hard, and I don’t want to build up my expectations too much only to find myself out of school, without a job, and without money to pay the rent. Especially not in this recession.
But I do want to become a full time writer now–at least, more than before. I don’t know if it will ever happen, but if I’ve dedicated this much of my life to it, why shouldn’t I shoot for it? I don’t know. We’ll see.
