Opinion
Monotonously routined days spiral downwardly into a rut
October 23, 2008
I am ready for a fresh start. Lately I have been lonely and tempestuous and disgruntled and furious and disenchanted with my life. I feel myself wearing thin and turning gray. I long for foreign languages and new views from unfamiliar windows. I am sinking into a crevice in which my good intentions morph into bad habits and my shoulders are folding in on my chest from lack of room to breathe.
I seem to be forever dealing with some crisis or another that has thrown itself at me, sometimes big things, sometimes small. Either way they add up. Car trouble, bad test/assignment grades, wet pants-cuffs, stubbed toes, fight with a friend, lack of money, lack of sleep, scholarship deadlines, my perpetual need for more time.
There is inevitably some unavoidable thing that rubs me the wrong way or gets under my skin. It has bestowed upon me a short temper and low tolerance for the most trivial of things. I feel myself forever grasping for small bits of time that don’t exist. I constantly feel that I just need to “get back on the wagon” and “get my shit together”, so to speak.
I have fallen into a rut, something that happens annually, but this year it seems to have crept up on me even faster. I am restless and behind and frustrated that I am once again falling into the same patterns and routines. It is making me unusually hotheaded and miserable. This year is the first year that it has cut this deep. I have never in my life not wanted to be in school. I was the student who demanded to go to school despite my mother’s advice to stay home and keep my viruses to myself and, in turn, likely gave you all my sicknesses so as not to skip a day.
This is the first year that none of my classes, despite how interesting they may be, have managed to summon from me that elated feeling academics usually fills me with. I wish I were somewhere else every minute I am forced to sit in those wobbly chairs cursing the half-desk I am forced to write on.
I am in need of two things I will forever be unable to possess at the same time. I need a break from the rigors of school in which I am able to relax and reintroduce myself to the things that have previously kept my chin up, while simultaneously acquiring extra time to catch up on all the things that are bogging me down… preferably in the form of a tear in the space-time continuum.
Thus, I am forced to spend time out of my day that I do not have contemplating a way in which to combat this feeling before it swallows me whole. Being forced to be so immersed in the tedious and lackluster parts of one’s life is unhealthy and unproductive. It curtails motivation and drive. It is imperative to find a way out.
Katie Heimer is double majoring in international studies and history, with a German minor.