Shedding Skin

First of all, I'd like to thank my amazing parents for sending me a care package :) For those of you who have actually read most of my posts, you'll remember how distraught I was at the concept of surviving these 4 months with only 7 pairs of socks. Well, my lovely parents heard my passive pleas and sent me not just a few, but 36 pairs of socks! My excitement is indescribable. They also sent me two pairs of gloves (one is the kind that are fingerless and flip into mittens!), a really cute scarf and a hat. And as you'll remember from the Scandinavia posts, I lost Hatty recently, so I was pretty damn excited to get a replacement :)

So before I go onto a more personal, self-reflecting musing, I'd like to share a quote from one of the books I'm reading that has inspired this self-relfection:

"At time I have the feeling that one emerges from what has been written as a snake emerges from its skin. That's it; you cannot write yourself down, you can only cast your skin. But who is going to be interested in this dead skin? The ever-recurring question whether the reader is ever able to read anything other than himself is superfluous: writing is not communication with the readers, not even communication with oneself, but communication with the inexpressible." - I'm Not Stiller - by Max Frisch (pg 284)

This book has, among other things, really gotten me thinking about these blogs. Who am I posting for? And what do I want, or even expect, to get out of it? Why blog when I'm in pretty stable communication with my friends and family back home. They've heard all this stuff before, they don't need to read it in a formal, gossip-less format. Am I just writing to remember the trip? Isn't that what all the pictures are for? Am I writing because it gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment when I see my statistics. It can't be this, because most of the time my statistics just make me wonder why I'm even bothering to write something that hardly anyone is reading. But perhaps it's not important that people read this. Perhaps the important thing is that I am having these experiences, and am growing and changing into a completely different person, and in order for me to be able to continue growing I need to shed the skin of my experiences as they come. This isn't the normal kind of personal growth that comes slowly; this is high-speed personal growth. Almost every experience I have here forces me to question and put into perspective aspects of my life: what I think makes me happy, or sad, what I really want to do with the rest of my life, my commitment to certain people and things, my relationships with everyone around me, and most importantly my own attitude and personality.

I don't know if the people here are also feeling this way, or this is perhaps the result of my own overactive self analysis. I know that this is probably the happiest I've been in a very long time, and that's without any qualifying statements. Usually when I'm incredibly happy, I always have to qualify it with something. Especially in relationships. "He's the best guy I've ever dated, especially because [insert negative quality of an ex-boyfriend here]." But here, I'm just happy. Even when I'm sad. I was thinking about it the other day, and when I'm sad here, my coping mechanisms are completely different than they are back home. I've yet to tell whether this is for better or worse, but it seems to be working well. One thing that I've just been shocked over is how well my friends respond to my depression. When you tell most people (or so has been my experience) that you suffer from depression, they look at you like you are a leper who is going to come into their lives and destroy their happiness. People just don't know how to handle it. They roll their eyes and tell to "get over it." They don't understand that some days you just can't get out of bed. But the people I've met here are so understanding, and don't roll their eyes. I feel comfortable telling them when I'm depressed because they ask me if I'm ok, if I want someone there with me, and to tell them if I need someone to talk to. It's unbelievable.

The men who I hang out with are also having a profound impact on my view of relationships. Hearing them discuss their present and past relationships has made me realize just how much crap I've put up with with former boyfriends because I thought that the things I found fundamental to a relationship, apparently weren't because I never received them. That isn't to say that my relationships have been terrible, most of them have made me incredibly happy, it's just that they've never been how I always imagine relationships were supposed to be. Like the relationships my guy friends have (and yes, I've heard negative sides of their relationships, so I'm not just looking at this through rose colored glasses). I tend to lose myself in relationships, and as a result, end up giving more of myself than I'm willing to give, making concessions and compromises that I don't want to make simply from fear of being left. I compromise who I am to make the other person happy. And that's not how relationships should work.

Some of the books I've been reading, and a few experiences I've had here, have actually been changing my concept of monogamous relationships. I don't even know if they are possible, at least without little hiccups along the road. It's like in 7th grade, when you have two best friends, and everyone tells you that you can't have two, you have to pick one. But you love both people, they just each bring different things to the table that fulfill your personal and emotional needs. There's no way you could ever pick between them because one person could never fulfill all of your needs, and you would never want to ask a person to try to. I think it's the same with relationships. People who try to make their significant other the bearer of all their needs just aren't in healthy relationships. This isn't to say that polygamy is the way to go, just that perhaps it is necessary to have different people to fill different needs. You can't just depend on one person. And you can't ask one person to be your everything. You would never want to feel the weight of the pressure that that puts on a person. And if you spend your life trying to find a single person who can aptly fulfill all of your needs, you will either never be happy, or end up completely remolding a person into the person you want them to be. This is a topic I haven't had too much time to digest, hence the disorganized thought pattern. I'll muse more about this again I'm sure.

Not all of the changes I've been experiencing are as romantic, or outwardly based. I've been seriously reconsidering and debating what I really want to do with my life. The plan has always (for the last 3 years) been to complete my degrees in History and Psychology this Spring, take a year off to work, and then start a PhD program. But I don't know if that's really what I want. Well, I know it's what I want, I just don't know if I'm capable of accomplishing it. If I even want to make the effort for something that I could potentially fail at. It's not just a little bit of effort that goes into getting a PhD, it's one of the biggest commitments I will likely ever make. Speaking with people on this program, I'm beginning to realize how completely ill-prepared for grad school I am. My gpa isn't amazing, I have no extra curricular activities, I've done no internships or jobs that have anything to do with my career path. If I was up against someone in this program for a spot in a PhD program, I can almost guarantee that they would get it and I wouldn't. I think part of this has to do with the school I chose to go to. I picked UCSC because the history and psychology programs were more in tune with what I want to study than UCLA's. I forgot to take into account the environment of students at UCSC. It's not the most serious school, there's no competition, general apathy surrounds the school. It's hard to thrive, or want to thrive, when you are surrounded by so much apathy. I've also got emotional issues that always interfere with my school work. Granted, they usually interfere with the work from courses that don't interest me, but it's still a major concern. You can't get a PhD when every few months or so you experience a huge depressive state that practically immobilizes you. I'm beginning to think that I'm just not cut out for this career path.

Or maybe I'm just too young to want to do it. I'm only 20, I'll be 21 when I graduate, and there's a whole wealth of experiences and things I haven't seen or done. I don't know if I want to lock myself down into a certain school or city for 7-9 years. Maybe I want to work on an archeological dig, or become a journalist, or work for a museum, or take the time to really embrace my photography and try to make something happen with that. I want to do all of those things, but I can't help this nagging feeling that if I don't start my PhD young, it will be too late. I'm also terrified that actually trying to make a career of photography would fail miserably, no matter how badly I want it. I feel like I'm floundering. I always have a plan. Always. And now I just feel lost. I know once I figure this all out, it will be amazing. I'll pick what I really want to do. And if it turns out that that's not what I want to do (like picking UCSC over UCLA, for example), then I'll survive and figure out a way to do what I really want. But until I reach a conclusion, I'm left here floundering. A planner with no plan or direction.

As stressful as these changes are for me right now, I know that once I fully shed the skin of these experiences I'll come out a better person. It may sound from this that I am tremendously depressed and lonesome, but I'm not. I'm just trying to make sure that when I finally do make changes in my life I'll know where they came from, and why I decided to choose that path. Like I said, I have an overactive mind that likes to analyze every aspect of my life. Self reflection is just not something I can avoid. And I'm sharing it here to help me work through it. As the reader, I expect you'll take away what you want from this post, and will likely not grasp what it is I'm really trying to say. But that's ok, this one's for me, not you.