Journal

Student Loans and Anxiety

January 17, 2024 — Leave a comment

Why is it so hard for me to do the student loan thing? I understand that there is a way for me to pay them without having that payment drastically affect my income. I’m having a lot of real anxiety about it. Was just remembering my trip to Oklahoma and my Mom asking me about the whole deal with that. This is something that she has been constantly reminding me of for years. Reminding is also perhaps a bit of an understatement. Whenever my Mom talks to me about the loans, she gets this tone, the pitch of her voice gets really high, and she insists that I need to handle paying them back, but in a way that makes me anxious, as if the fate of my future hinges on paying back the loans. I’ve actually avoided paying them for more than a decade by continually taking jobs where I was paid under the table, or working for non-profits temporarily enough to where my income information was just not obtainable in time for wage garnishing. Until I was at IKEA for more than two years. I have a very sad story about my ex during that time.

Mom’s emotions have a way of coloring my own. I’m sure this is not uncommon for children, especially those who are close to their parents. In a way, after visiting my mother again this year, and seeing her reaction to me finally paying the nearly $500 a month bill, and to hear her say how unfair that amount of money is, and that she can’t believe that I have to pay that much money for school, and for the subject to be just a casually moved on from, as we sit in the Pho restuarant and eat our soup, rather galls me.

Was it that I never could articulate how unfair the who situation feels? My parents never told me about any other options besides going to college, paying for university. My mom said she tried to convince me to go to community college, but if she did I don’t remember her insisting on such with as much bile as she does when she tells me to pay back big uni. Maybe it was lost among the anxiety I was feeling while walking on eggshells in my home around dad, or that I couldn’t wait to get away from him and be queer in a place I knew would be safe(r) than Carson. The constant finals, the hormones and madness of unrequited crushes,hurtling toward the looming abyss of independence and adulthood, heady with dreams of a bright future. Maybe it was the fact that she was five states away, living out her post middle age with her sister and nieces and mother in an apartment, which came with its own conversations, probably more of what we talked about when we spoke on the phone every week.

She has basically one foot in the grave at this point, and she went to school in a time when it was mostly paid for. She didn’t even finish college until 3 years after dropping out because she needed one credit to earn her degree, and didn’t even know.

Speaking to her about the circumstances in my life, sometimes feels fruitless. Helping her understand won’t take away the years I spent dodging the subject because I may have felt too frustrated to explain how I felt my life had been shunted down a pre-scheduled path. I even lied to them for years about wanting to be a veterinarian, because I saw how people beamed with admiration when I said it. But the truth was, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I did know that adults tended to shower just that much more praise and support on children who said as much, and because the earliest parts of my life had been traumatizing and painful and lacking real comfort and safety, I knew that saying so felt safer than not. I think maybe I thought that it didn’t really matter so much, that I would find something eventually. One of those things that seems more like an issue for the older people in my life. I was more concerned with navigating child society, or rather, reinventing myself for the dozens of social changes that occurred during that time.

I resent how my mom got to make me feel anxious because she was too ignorant to know that she didn’t really know what she was talking about, but I must also realize that the reigns are somewhat more in my grasp at the moment. And that maybe that is the most anxiety dispelling realization of all.

Jan. 17th 2023: Lifeshapes

January 17, 2024 — Leave a comment

Was just thinking about what I wanted to call the shape of my life. And how I was thinking about how lives are shaped. What twists and subterranean paths, and sudden stops the shapes of lives can take. People have been living out strange and amazing lives, whose shapes to an outside observer, make take on something that may resemble a knotted, pile of offal. stinking and deplorable except for its tedious conceivability. A life that may feel watery, as if it weren’t material in the sense of something having its own distinctive edge, as liquid flowing in the easiest path. Some lives may shine brightly, and burn so violently as to extinguish the lives of those around them. Some lives may appear to have all the qualities of a known sum, and remain as such for the duration, save for the very last moment, when some lacuna in the foundation is uncovered, peered into, and understood to be a branch into entirely different sections, and must therefor re-contextualize the whole thing, dizzyingly, astonishingly, completely.

Humans develop a sense for grasping and palpating a life’s shape. But as long as humans have been living, they have been finding novel ways to live. Novel feelings that come from experiencing radically alien circumstances, providence of an ever more unfurling and complex world. As we have created habit, formed routines, and consolidated traditions that have laid out familiar paths for humans to inhabit, these life shapes take on patterns, and perhaps even lend themselves to be ascribed tangible value, and possibly even meaning. But as our ancient ancestors may have perceived, as they clawed meager subsistence into life shapes so abbreviated but nonetheless striking in their temerity and overwhelming pathos, there’s always something you may not have expected, unseen, and headed directly towards you. All the planning and reading of signs, and carefully executed maneuvers, are but sophistry, perfectly suited for our entertainment, and none the potenter. Being alive means living with the plausibly deniable knowing that most things are beyond our control.

Sometimes I wonder about what my life shape will be. And how I can use my talents to make it at least try and resemble something that I could call…meaningful. I don’t thing what I’ve done with my life would make me very proud to explain it to someone else. Other people’s lives seem so much more interesting and meaningful to me. More graspable because they feel more familiar than my own, which upon waking most mornings, tends to feel more and more inscrutable. Maybe changing a few of my daily circuits could do the trick. I would like to be more involved in trying to create beautiful things. Moments of humanity that I can look back at and hold in my palms, like they were proof that I did something that made a positive difference, instead of feeling like my burning daylight is so much flash in so much pan.

#lifeshape#lacuna#meaning#plausible deniability