Re The New Year

So the new year hasn't been treating me all that differently than the old year did. I can't say that I'm surprised. It's foolish to think that all the problems that ailed you one day would suddenly go away the next day just because the decade is over. It's not a huge secret that I've had a bad couple of months. Things haven't really been right for some time. There's been this overwhelming feeling in my life for months that I'm not as good of an academic as I want to be, nor will I ever be. Personally, I blame turning 28. I mean, when I was a kid I thought I'd be an astronaut by now. Turning out to be a pretty average twenty-something year old with no obvious traits to her name and only her significant other to tell her that she has “smart insights” into media studies is kind of a let down. Especially when I'm working on my second undergraduate degree and I still don't know how to live the life I want, or even exactly what that is. Actually, I don't blame turning 28. I blame my lifelong friend, “Prove to my peers that I'm smart and not a failure”. “Prove to my peers” has been behind a lot of nervousness about doing what I do in life and has ruined a lot of friendships. It's only gotten worse as I've moved into my late '20s. I feel like by now I should have something big to show for my time on this earth. Younger people than I have done greater things and “Prove” likes to remind me of this almost everyday. The fear of failure, the fear of looking stupid or sucking, has kept me stymied for the better part of the past ten years.

There's a lot that got me down: peers who have stopped responding to my emails, the fact that, for reasons I'm not going into on the internet, I had to bail on an activism conference I was going to work on this semester, a general feeling of doubt about whether this degree means anything or whether anyone wants to hear my opinions on race and gender in video games. I really don't know how to proceed on any of this. It's gotten so bad in the past week or so that I've been literally waking up at 10 am, not showering, and spending all day in my pajamas watching Maury online when even daytime television drives me to insanity. (I have stopped being snarky about Dr. Oz or The Doctors. I am now used to their shows. In another few weeks in this manner I think I'd actually look forward to them.) Also, I've been making ghetto sangria. I don't even have the interest to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or start working through Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (I'm writing a thesis this semester on the POP: Sands of Time trilogy). People, I'm so depressed I don't want to read about zombies or play video games. Video games that count as academic research. (Seriously, I get academic credit for playing three video games and interpreting how the game represents gender and race. How awesome is that?!)

“Okay, great, whatever.” you say. “Why are you griping about this?”

“Hey, chill, overly anxious person from the internet.” I say. “I'm getting to it.”

My point in all this is to say that yesterday I changed all that. I got up at a reasonable hour. I showered. I put on real clothes. I did laundry and dishes and made headway on the filing I have neglected for the past three years. I turned Seesmic off on my phone and temporarily turned off the SMS messages from Twitter on the few people I follow on my phone. I resisted the urge to check my @ replies every few minutes to see if anyone in the internet world missed me and wanted to be my friend and talk to me. I tried very hard not to have imaginary conversations with various Star Trek actors. On this I failed (In my head Star Trek actors that I meet at conventions totally want to talk to me and think I'm awesome and smart and cool.) but I kept the “OMG! You're really awesome and that Star Trek musical sounds really cool and it was not weird that you Mary-Sue'd yourself into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as a kid and wrote short stories about your character for your eighth grade English class creative writing assignments! Let's go to the bar and talk some more!” chatter to a minimum. (For the record, in my mind, LeVar Burton and Jonathan Frakes think I'm awesome.) And you know what? It felt good. It was hard, but it felt good.

I can get by without always being connected to the internet, waiting for that next email or tweet to convince me that people really do want me around. I mean, it was lonely, but how can I get creative and make things when I can't get up from the computer long enough to think about what I want to do in life? I mean, I'm still having a hard time, I still wish the people who have yet to respond to my emails would respond, and yes, it would be lovely to feel that someone out there cares about what I have to say or about me as just a nice person. But I took a step yesterday and I think that counts for something.

Now here's the interesting part: I wrote most of that two nights ago. I was up late, watching late night television and wavering between wanting to sleep and wanting to stay up. While I tried to understand the nuances of late night poker I began thinking about whether this is how I want all my nights to go. It was not. So, as I tweeted about hearing awesome new bands on late night television, I wrote up a blog entry for the following day from the point of view of the end of a good, yet realistic, day. It was like a plan or a creative writing exercise that involved me personally. I was determined to make it work and it did, for the most part.

Granted, the “reasonable hour” I got up at was still 10:00am but the rest of it – the showering, getting dressed and doing work around the house that needed to get done – happened. I did do the dishes, wash and fold laundry and handle most of the past three years of filing. It was also true that I tended towards talking to myself and after an hour of silence got lonely enough to put ST:TNG episodes on as background noise to focus my thoughts on. I didn't have a great day; it was still hard to get through. One of my old supervisors emailed me for my address to send me my 2009 W-2 form and all the emotions that went with my old job – frustration, depression, regret, longing for respect – came crashing back on me. I thought about how nice that extra paycheck would be right now and yelled at myself for not just being able to swallow working in an environment that I didn't fit into. I quit my job in a recession to follow my bliss? What the hell kind of nonsense is that? I repeated as I folded towels. I wanted desperately to check up on Twitter and the blogs I normally read and spend my day scanning updates without really reading them. There are fun, interesting, smart people on the internet. I wonder what they're doing right now? I mused as I tried to make sense of all my student loan forms. Can I be “from the internet” some day?

But there are things I'm proud of: In addition to getting a lot of housework done, staying off the internet, and avoiding daytime television I didn't have a single drink yesterday. I really wanted one – lines about “wine and beer!” from RENT kept floating through my brain every time I opened the refrigerator – but I resisted. I'm really proud of that one.

So, here we are. Day two. I don't have a game plan for today but I'm dressed and awake. And that's a lot to be proud of so far today.