After several more items of frustration, including an errant letter from the financial aid office at Columbia University and missing information that I already sent. All that fun stuff. Plus a miniature nervous breakdown. I am not usually like this. It is the phase of the moon, if you catch my meaning.
My dad just called me with his usual unusual advice. He operates under a lifestyle of full accountability and no excuses, including what he calls "The Asshole Principle": That is, when there is an 'asshole' in your life, or something blocking your way, it is there because you have somehow created it and is there to teach you something about yourself. That is, what is the "hook" that is keeping you from moving forward. He wanted to invite me to ask myself why I have created an energy of distress for myself today despite the organic reasons.
It's an interesting question, and I'm interested in the answer, even as I have no clue myself. I have been extremely apprehensive about the visa process as well as the financial aid process. There have been a lot of stumbling blocks, which have added to my worries, but I suppose by worrying more I create more stumbling blocks. My main worry is just time -- getting it all together and ready to go at a certain time. I thought I had a LOT more time, but then July hit and suddenly I don't even have two weeks anymore before I go to the consulate -- if I even keep that appointment time.
I guess it's just the terribly oppressive and scary thought of having to figure it out by myself -- in the case Raj can't help me get down, it's me. In a foreign city, trying to find a building where I have heard everything about how if you don't have the right number of copies and exact documents they need, you don't get the visa.
What would that mean? No Paris, I suppose, and that thought is probably the scariest -- I'm convinced, for whatever reason, that I must be in Paris next fall, and thus I have to make it happen somehow. But ever more the stumbling blocks to get there keep arriving, and ever since I got into the program there have been reasons to doubt my ability to physically be in Paris. Why is that? Do I not want to go?
Maybe I'm just scared of it. It's a long way from home. It's a foreign culture. I probably won't know anyone at all. I don't have a lot of money. There's a lot that is uncertain, and unsure, and the responsibility falls -- for the most part -- on my own shoulders. I have a tendency, when that happens, to not want to deal with things. Just say, I can't deal with this, and back away. I suppose the lesson is, dive in and grab it with your teeth, accept the challenges cheerfully, instead of fearfully (that rhymes). Cheesy sounding, I know, but probably truthful.
One of the other things I wanted to blog about today was my recent thoughts on the fact that, despite everything, I will only be turning 20 years old two weeks from tomorrow. I am only halfway through college, and yet, in the past six weeks, I have been living as though I am fully an adult and graduated. I hardly know how to think about being back in school; after all, we found an apartment, I went hunting for -- and got -- two jobs, and I've been worrying about furnishing and grocery bills and whose turn it is to do the dishes. It has been overwhelming in the fact that it really wasn't that overwhelming at all (I know my earlier frantic posts will deny that, but in retrospect). And yet, here I am, not even twenty one (I've noticed it would be great to be twenty one and be able to go hang out at bars with my sister, just to be together and out, and not necessarily stuck in the apartment). Not even twenty.
I suppose that, in trying to be an adult in life here in Asheville, I've been trying to compensate by subconsciously wanting the visa process to solve itself, and since it hasn't, it's been trying to get my attention and show me that, despite my best efforts to ignore it, I really have to take responsibility for it and make it happen.
That, and today just isn't a good day for me.
I can't decide if I want to wait and just sniff out if there is a possibility that I actually will be able to make the appointment, and start trusting that things will work out -- a novel idea -- or change it now. I think my best option is to see where we are next Friday and then decide -- but of course it affects work schedules and everything else, since everyone is expecting me to be gone a certain weekend and it will fuck up a lot of things if that changes. But we shall see, and I suppose I will try my best to calm down about it all.
Until later.
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