Friday, February 5, 2010

Self Esteem....Who needs it, Right?

I wish I didn't.

I heard wonderful news today! My little sister, four years younger than me, all of 22 years old, got into Graduate School as of today, Vet School. Yay sis......BOOO ME. I got four years on her and I'm still working on my Bachelors Degree #1.

It's not that I am unhappy with my life per sey...I'm not, I'm content enough, although I am more than ready to be moving on to a new state, city, and social crowd for the most part....I just, feel as if, in my life, I haven't done much, not on the grand scale at least. On the day-to-day I can list at least a dozen things a day that I've done that make me feel accomplished, especially when it comes to talking about my students. But if people who don't know me on a day-to-day basis were to look back on the sum of my life, I'm not sure they would have anything spectacular to say about me, or it.

I want to do something amazing, I want to make such a difference that I feel it each and everyday reverberating through my life.  It is a greedy thing to want, to make a difference in order to make myself feel good. There are those people who would say that I have already made a tremendous difference, there are people who say it now, but I don't feel it. Instead, I just feel tired, I feel as if I have given so much of me that there is hardly any me inside and I need something to fill me up again. I need new places, new faces, new sights and sounds, new responsibilities, and the chance to forget my whole life so far and act as if it never happened.

I wonder if this is what a mid-life crisis is like. The almost over-whelming urge to just up and change everything about my life, dump all the old and pick up only all new. Or maybe, this is just the winter getting to me, it's my 24th winter here, I am positively done with them. I have to keep telling myself though...one more to go, only one more....

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Surprise!

It's one thing that humans seem to have an innate knack for, surprising you. Or perhaps it is the knack for being surprised, I don't know, but I find myself and others constantly being surprised, by others. It isn't necessarily in a good way, or in a bad way, but the ability to constantly end up doing something in a way that surprises, or even at all that surprises you. Sometimes it means you end up disappointed in the person, unfortunately experience with those types of surprises has jilted me against believing anything anyone says at face-value, although it proves in-valuable in school. Sometimes, however, it is a pleasant, even uplifting surprise, and it is moments like those that have the ability to renew one's faith in the human race.






I write, stories, poems, fan fiction, whatever comes to mind, to take me away from this world for a while and allow my overactive imagination to take wing and explore things and storylines no one else ever has before. I personally have always thought my writing to be rather good (until I reread it several years later and redub it as juvenile), and of course, my mother has always thought the same, but recently, I submitted a rewriting of a fan fiction story to FanFiction.net just to get it out there and hopefully use the site as encouragement to continue writing on a more regular basis. I never expected anyone to read it, and not many people have, but to my immense surprise, and delight, not only did some people read it, but it was even favorite by several people and I even got a deliberate comment of encouragement! Oh the kindness of strangers!






I think, in my universal wisdom, that this stranger's comment, constructive criticism actually, for which I was highly thankful if not prompt in responding to, meant more to me than if it had come from someone I knew. There is something to be said for communications between absolute strangers, the filters come off, or so I would like to think. If there is no predetermined relationship between two people, then there is no reason to need to put up the facade of being who you were when you first met or who they want to see in order to maintain that level of relationship or friendship. With strangers, be you brave enough to make a few annoyed, angry, or whatever, you are free to be exactly who you are at that particular moment, free to say what you wish and do what you wish, and, honestly, to care less about the consequences. I should meet more strangers, it would be nice to have a group of people, ever changing, to meet with and just speak frankly, not get to know all that well, although that might be inevitable, but people to know who expect frankness and bluntness and even constructive or non-constructive rudeness.