| | Sometimes, in our daylit lives, in the safety of electric lights, we
forget that darkness is the natural state of things. When I used
to go out walking at night, that was always what troubled me.
Darkness doesn't fall, it doesn't cover things, it can't be
lifted. It's light that falls, light that alters and
distorts. Darkness is simply light's absence. However,
darkness can mean more than just an absence of light. In our
metaphorical language, darkness is the absence of knowledge, or maybe
it's just that we think of knowledge as light. Fear of the dark
is impossible, because darkness is nothing. We fear that which we
do not know. When I lay in bed at night as a child darkness
didn't scare me. The spectres of the night, things I couldn't see
or even imagine, plagued my sleep.
Now, at nineteen, the future is dark in front of me. I have no
paths. I have no maps. I feel like the lost sheep, having
strayed beyond my comfortable pastures with no guiding light to tell me
which way to go. I cannot go back. I must simply keep
moving ahead without aim. School was awful. I still shrink
away even from thinking about it because the fact that I left is a
huge, unhealed wound. I'm so defensive and hurt about it that I
can't even explain to myself why I left. There are so many
reasons, and I give different ones to different people, but I still
don't entirely understand. I don't know if I can face going to
Tufts again. I feel ashamed and hurt that I left, and at this
point I won't even go there to pick up my stupid bike because I don't
want to see my dorm again. There are still people I haven't told
that I quit school. I feel like I failed. The shadow of my
confusion about Tufts has been contributing to my aimlessness to a
larger degree than I really want to admit.
I have doubts about where I want to go with my work. I committed
to a whole year of doing this, and I know that's not that big a deal,
since I left school for at least that long anyways, but what do I do
after that? Do I push for advancement? Do I want to work in
a Macy's indefinitely? Should I try to move to a more upscale
store with higher pay? Is that really an improvement, or just
more stress at essentially the same career level? Should I try to
become a makeup artist? Is that even remotely what I want to
do? Do I want to just forget the whole thing and go back to
school and do something else entirely? But for what? What
do I want to study? And to what end? I feel like I should
at least keep on this career path and see where it takes me, because
it's some kind of bearing, at least till I have more direction.
Plus I don't like quitting things. And I like doing this.
That must mean something.
I feel the same way about my love life. I want things to be going
somewhere or I feel stuck and frustrated. I don't want to be
caught between "want" and "should" all the time. I question
myself all the time and I don't know if I just want to be married now
because, like the job, it's a bearing, it's a step in some concrete
direction, or because it's actually the direction I want to be
going. I mean, I do want that, don't get me wrong, but it's the
when and how that get to me. How do the pieces of all these
things fit together? Which is most important to me? At
least when I was in school there was a system. There were
requirements to complete, steps to take, places to be at certain
times. I feel like maybe I need that kind of structure, or I need
someone in my life to be giving that to me. I want that person to
be Sasha, but I don't know how to explain that to him. I just
want someone or something to be my starting point, my rock, or light,
to go back to the metaphor I was thinking about earlier. Then
when I have that, everything else can build from that. It's not
that I'm a dependent person, but everyone needs goals. If I
didn't come with them built in, where am I supposed to get them
from?
Sometimes I think I end up answering my own questions but I don't want to listen to myself because the answers are hard.
"In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the
light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend
it...That was the true Light, which gives light to every man coming
into the world." John 1:4-9
"Therefore, whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will
liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock." Matt. 7:24
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| | Posted 12/27/2006 12:16 AM - 8 views - 3 comments
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