posted 2004/02/24 at 02:19
Nothing quite like pulling your six-week old binder out of your backpack and finding one of the rings so fucked up that you can't even turn pages in the binder anymore. And I specifically bought one of the heavy-duty ones because I tend to be rough on my books and stuff.
In case you couldn't guess, right now I should either be doing homework or falling asleep. (I'm allowed late nights on Sunday because I don't have class on Mondays.) I swear, though, I am just feeling so deflated right now. Even when I'm with Spectrum people, even when I'm doing stuff that should bring me at least some sense of fun, it's just not working. Usually my depression is triggered by something, and while I've had lots of potential triggers these past couple of weeks, none of them seem to be the cause of it. I think this latest spell may actually be a strictly chemical-based reaction.
I've still got one last grad school application to send out -- to Antioch University Los Angeles -- but I just can't seem to bring up the willpower to get it done, especially after getting the rejection letter from Indiana. I didn't even want to apply to Indiana, but my advisor thought I was aiming a bit high with the other schools I was applying to, and suggested Indiana as a "safety net" in case I didn't get into any of the other schools. And now even the safety net's gone. And you know, I wouldn't have even minded so much if I hadn't had to take those loans out to get through this last year at UT. If I don't get into graduate school, then I'm going to leave UT with a degree that won't even be worth the paper it's printed on (undergraduate degrees in creative writing don't mean shit), having to find some sort of way to pay back my student loan money with no marketable skills. At least if I didn't have that money to pay off, I could go back to mooching off my parents for all those years before I went back to college.
If there's one thing that's come up repeatedly in the counseling I've received, it's that one of my biggest problems is that I'm always trying to be perfect -- based both on setting unrealistic goals for myself and a deep-rooted need to be accepted by others -- and that I don't take rejection that well. So what will it mean if, despite a perfect GPA, despite near-perfect GREs, despite being a "well-rounded" student in every sense of the term, and despite the fact that I've built credentials as a writer that most undergraduates don't have, that somehow I still can't get into any MFA programme? What if being perfect isn't even enough?
I can't think about that right now. Back to schoolwork.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon