How to be a person and why I suck at it

Today is just one of those days where I feel like crawling out of my skull. The world is cast over; things seem darker to me, like everything around me is under exposed. Positive, happy thoughts seem to take years to travel through me, and by the time they reach my lips, they've lost substance, hollow skeletons blowing in the wind. Basically, I'm in a terrible mood.

I despise school. I'm tired of it. I feel like I"ve been doing things because I feel like it's what I'm supposed to do. You're supposed to go to school and get a bachelors degree. You're supposed to just keep your head down, do your work, and shut the fuck up about it. Everyone goes through the same thing; what makes me so special? Nothing, really. Except for the fact that I just can't shut the fuck up about it. I can't keep my head down and obey. There is a part of me that always wonders 'why?' or 'what is the point?' And when I can't come up with a point, or when the effort involved doesn't balance out the reward, I get upset. I get discouraged. I get really frustrated.

I've chosen to do a music degree. Cello performance. I decided to do this when I was 16 years old, and so far I have not ever deviated from that goal. I went to college because everyone goes to college after they graduate from high school. I felt proud of myself that I KNEW what I wanted to do, as opposed to my peers who seemed to wander from subject to subject, unsure.

Maybe they had the right idea. Maybe it was a bad idea to be in school to begin with. So far all I've done is accrue debt. I don't feel any closer to my degree than I did six fucking years ago. To be more fair to myself, I transferred schools between states, and a lot of the credits I'd earned in WMU were not counted here at NIU. But still, dammit. I should have more to show for all this damn time in school. A degree. Some kind of tangible skill or knowledge that will serve me in the wide, scary world. Unless you count life experience as part of that, I'm kind of boned, because I'm pretty sure you can gain life experience without blowing 15k a year in a university. That just comes from being fucking alive.

So my problem is, I just . . . can't justify school to myself. I sit in class and feel like I'm waiting for the pistol to sound the start of the race. I can't shut that voice up in the back of my head; the one that is chanting 'why? why? why? how is this relevant? why are you wasting time?' I can't get the thought out of my head that I'm just getting this stupid degree because it's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to have a bachelors degree. It's practically the new high school degree; any decent job out there requires one.

Except, the economy is screwed so many times over that there is this over saturation of people with degrees who can't get jobs. So there's that. Why am I driving myself deeper into debt if I'm going to come to teh same end? College graduate with a useless degree, wandering around applying for jobs at fast food restaurants because nothing else is fucking available.

It's kind of like how people buy houses because that's what you're supposed to do. It's an 'asset'. It's valuable, and will only grow in value. I mean, maybe that was true a few years ago, but it sure as hell isn't true now. You buy a house, you're essentially buying a box for you to die in. You're buying a ball and chain that's going to keep you somewhere, and should you ever need to move, ha! Forget about it. You'll be sitting in that house for a long time, and IF you're lucky enough to sell, it's not going to be for as much as you bought it for, regardless of how much you sunk into it. The exact thing happened to my parents. They bought a gorgeous house, spent all this money in improving it, and then when they wanted to move, they managed to sell it, but at a substantial loss. So why the fuck is everyone still buying houses?

I don't know. I don't claim to be an expert on the situation. It just seems so weird to me that we're all doing the same things in life; college, marriage, babies, houses. We're all standing in the lunchline, getting the same slop slapped onto our trays, even though that slop might not be the best for us.

So you're probably saying 'Well, what do you want to do, Jillian? Aside from complain? ' I want to write books. That's that. I have a list of ideas I've been collecting, notes I take whenever something occurs to me. I daydream about my characters and the things they'll do and say to each other. I write little snippits of scenes when I have the focus. That's what I want to do. And I'm happy when I write. I know the publishing world is difficult (understatement, lol) and I know it takes monumental effort to write and edit a novel well enough for it to see the light of day. I don't care. Writing is just about the only thing I do these days that makes me happy.

And this is what frustrates me most. I'm in school, learning a bunch of stupid things that I won't strictly need in my life as an adult. I'm doing all of this INSTEAD of writing. INSTEAD. I guess we can boil all my bitching down to that one fact.

Well, go cry about it some more. This is what being an adult is like, you say. Well, maybe I don't want to be an adult. Maybe I don't want to be a person in that unending lunchline, getting all the requisite foods dumped on my plate.

I don't know. I can't really talk to anyone about this stupid bullshit, because everyone I know is going through stuff that is way worse than what I am. Wahh I can't write my books. I think if I knew myself, I would punch myself in the throat for being a whiny asshole. And yet, I can't help it. Telling myself that I'm being a fucking baby doesn't magically make me less frustrated with my life. It makes me frustrated and then mad at myself for being a fucking baby.

Suzi tells me I'm too much in my head. Yeah, I know that's true. That's the problem, isn't it? I can't do, say, or observe anything without going on some stupid mental pilgrimage over all the different things I think about it.