reflection

I just got done with one of the worst* semesters of my college career.

It was definitely the worst semester grades-wise. No doubt about that. But worse than even the bad grades was the fact that something in my attitude and desire changed. My self-discipline went down the drain near the end. I slept in my bed one night out of ten; more accurately, I didn't sleep at night during the last few weeks. In the two weeks before the end, I would catch a few hours collapsed on a chair from like four thirty to six-ish when the Russian house dinners would force me awake.

Anyway--a long story made short--I didn't sleep at night, rarely slept at all, didn't seriously study for my finals, BS-ed my way through seven or eight papers in the last two weeks of school, never exercised, ate garbage except for Russian house dinners. Until my little sister came over to my apartment and rang the doorbell till I woke up, then took me shopping in her roommate's car. It was as if I were a degenerate drunk and she had to rehabilitate me.

Basically, as I walked away from my last final on the Friday of finals week, after learning that I had just barely pulled myself away from a C grade in my Protestant Reformation class, that my life is a pathetic shade of what it should and could be. More than that, I realized that I needed some sort of wake-up call or I would just keep spiraling downwards.

I've got one quote listed on my Facebook "favorite quotes" thing. Right then, those words from George Eliot's Middlemarch suddenly hit me full force:

"We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement."

I am on that perilous margin. And it sucks. A tough self-realization. I got on my bike and pedaled the frigid ten minutes back up the hill to my apartment, thinking of all the ways that I fit the description that "Miss" Eliot gave for people who watch themselves hit the bottom and "with dull consent" refuse to do anything about it.

At the risk of echoing Sufjan-- I've made a lot of mistakes this semester. I'm not going to go into all of them. This is not the time or place. But I bumbled my way through a relationship with a girl who I didn't deserve before she ended it having given a lot but receiving very little from my end. Boy, could I write some blog posts about regrets I have from all the blunders I made in that relationship--my first. Aside from that, I saw my Russian start to pick up, then tank and finally degenerate into stutters and awful, halting speech. A class that I actually cared about got completely shoved under the rug in order for me to somewhat maintain other classes that required more immediate work from me. All classes got shoved under the rug, to be honest. I missed classes because I couldn't get out of bed. I called off 10 AM shifts at work because I would wake up at 9:40 and not have the will or tenacity to force myself out of bed. And did I exercise at all? Ever?

I could go on and on, but I probably shouldn't. What's important is that I became of what I had done and what I was doing. I realized that I saw myself going down this road of insipid misdoing and shabby achievement and I wasn't going to do anything about. I realized too late to save this semester.

Luckily, though, I reached the point where the thought of being "led forward with dull consent," like some sort of dumb ox or cow to a life of mediocrity made me sick. And that nausea, tempered with a little bit of Christmas break and family support, should be enough to wake me up.

Luckily, I'm only 23 and hopefully have a lot more life to live and try to get right.

*Sorry for the somewhat bitter and melancholy tone of this post. I don't like the idea of sounding emo or all that self-absorbed. But I felt like the realization and the honesty were important for me to get down somewhere. The blog is mine, I can do what I want with it.