"This is a trajectory and your ending is nowhere in sight yet."
Notes to Self are longer journal entries from Seven Yrs Ago. Read The Middle for more on burnout. I was 21 in early 2014.
I don’t ever want to stay in or leave something because I’m too scared of doing the opposite.
Take architecture for example. I left because I don’t want to be an architect. Along with all my other emotional and mental hangups, I knew that architecture and studio was the last thing I wanted to focus on right now.
And I was too focused before; I had blinders on.
WHAT I WANT TO DO
Use words effectively
Help people + get to know people
Change things
Fuckin’ learn
I know that those are the broadest vocations but that’s the best I can think of. Those are things I want to commit to 100% and such overarching goals can govern enough for me, can work out my life without creeping thru and destroying it. Those are some things that, I don’t think architecture, at least being an architect, will give me.
Right now I almost feel as satisfied, or even more satisfied, helping out my friends with their designs or executing them as much as I was doing it myself. If I should ever go back to the architecture 5 year program, I don’t ever want my motivation to come from a place of feeling inadequate or that the 5 year program is the only way that I can feel strong or feel good about myself.
Because for a long time it hasn’t. I think it was partial high stress and self doubt but from also putting that as my Plan A when there are other things I wanted instead as my Plan A, like writing.
I need to accept certain things about myself: my desires, my hobbies, my quirks, my tendencies.
What I don’t have to accept are my fears of failure, of weakness, of being seen as less than myself, of being less than myself.
I need to feel how it is to be… normal, to not use work or school or whatever as an excuse from going after my (I hesitate to say it) dreams. It’s weird. Like as much as I say I want to be a writer and that I will do it and how so much more right it feels to claim that for myself than it is to say I’m an architect, I still am, and should be proud, that I’m getting a degree in architecture/design. This has changed me a lot more than anything else I could’ve pursued right out of high school. I probably wouldn’t be at the same precariously balanced, but still higher mental plane as I am now.
Really. Architecture and our teachers keep teaching us to own ourselves, particularly thru our work.
Unfortunately, I keep getting these Vietnamesque flashbacks to the stress I felt when I thought I couldn’t handle the work. You just know that you need to figure out your priorities this semester and what you want to achieve.
And if it helps, every semester, you have come out on top for yourself in the end. It just never is the end; that’s why you have to take your great checkpoints and keep running with them. This is a trajectory and your ending is nowhere in sight yet. Don’t look at the ground.
Therapist’s diagram of work and progress. What looks like the same view may still be at a higher plane.
My therapist was hinting at how I will have bad days. There will be days when I will feel like I’m back at square 1. But I won’t be. I know more about myself now and I know I have more people than myself, that I can depend on and trust.
The important thing to remember Nicole is that you’re more okay than you’ve ever been and you’ve only been getting better. Even that breakdown was a sign that you’re getting better because your body and your brain knew that you couldn’t go on like that, that you need to unload the extra baggage so you can run quicker. You were in NASCAR and as daredevil as you were to do it, you didn’t actually know how to brake or drive; this semester you’re putting the car together and you’re going to learn to drive stick.
Drag hard, but not your body.
For commentary seven years later, go here.