i'm fairly angry at myself right now, because i am torn between apathy and the desire to finally reach my full potential as a student. i hate to attribute it all to the fact that i am waiting for three letters in the mail... but essentially, that's what it boils down to. i am a wreck of humanity right now.
my grades have been slipping within the past couple of weeks. i got a B- on a paper today, and it's the lowest grade i can remember getting in quite some time. paradoxically, i waste time computing my gpa to see if i could get magna cum laude if i were to get a 4.0 this semester. as it turns out, i would be .00625 off the mark. so my resulting attitude is not to bother, as long as i keep cum laude, who cares? this would be an okay trade-off if (A)i actually didn't care, and (B)if it meant i was actually having fun rather than wallowing in misery. but it's so much easier to make excuses than to try. i wish i set some sort of attainable goals for myself rather than setting ridiculous ones like getting a 4.0, or getting into harvard.
of course, the main problem is you can't tell what's unattainable until you try-- and i daresay i've hardly ever tried to do something unattainable until the fulbright and carnegie. it's sort of a sucker punch to take, realizing that you're not that great.
i don't handle rejection very well. not that anyone is great at it, but i have a tendency to harp. i am still harping on mark rejecting me, and i'm sure i always will be. the secret is, i think i am fantastic. i am an inwardly cocky bastard. if you met me tomorrow, you would never know that. but after a while, you would figure it out. so when someone else, whether it be a boy or an admissions committee, doesn't like me, i can't figure it out. my world is just thrown upside-down. to be honest, i think its a defense mechanism that i set up because i didn't have a lot of friends and was uncool, well, forever. i was going to try to put a timeframe on that, but it remains true. and i got so used to my mom telling me that kids were just stupid, and they didn't understand me, that i believed it. hell, it was a lot more gratifying to be snottily superior than to cry everyday when i came home from school.
so there you have it. i have this incredible confidence built up, but it's a house of cards that topples at the slightest touch or even a gust of wind. my old psychiatrist would say it's because i base my self-worth on others, or on grades, and never on myself. and that's still true. i blamed all of my problems last year on mark, and this year on being rejected from grad schools. (which hopefully won't happen-- but that's thing, the prospect of it happening is enough.) but the real heart of the matter is that i have to learn to fail. i don't know what having serious problems is like. i don't know what really losing anything means. i can't get back up again because i've never hit the ground. i've never even let go.
and still, i'll only talk about it.
prove to me, i'm tired of words-- they don't ever mean a thing
prove to me, i'm tired of words now, now
two points for honesty
