Changes

I find myself in a bit of a cynical mood at the moment, and a foreboding sense of urgency looms over my head, daring me to finish this entry before my patience runs thin.

The last one year has been a complicated one for me. The most striking observation I can make is that I’ve been my adaptable best in an ever-changing environment. I’ve become more aware of my inner strength, yet have been scathed by what I think are my intellectual and emotional inadequacies.

I’ve personally experienced how debilitating an inflated ego can be to relationships and how it sensitizes a person greatly to the smallest irritants that he/she faces in everyday life. So many of the world’s problems have egotistical origins – at some point during my observations, I vowed to never be a person whose lust for attention would drive them to do the things I witnessed. In an attempt to stay aware of myself and improve as an individual, I think I’ve gone so far down this path of keeping my ego in check that the results are almost ironic and a little sad. I don’t believe I’ve ‘improved myself’ by any quantifiable amount in this regard – I still am an overly sensitive person who always feels that people should walk for a day in MY shoes, and I’ve bashed my emotional self into a non responsive pulp. Some might call it a low self-esteem issue, whereas I defend it by calling it a desire for perfection. For most other people I know, the desire for success and/or perfection translates into ‘things that can be done’, whereas I find myself cribbing and whining as to why I can’t do something. It may be argued that there is a direct link to the frustrations of scientific research. Three months down the line I will trivialize what I am doing right now in this academic environment. This non-equilibrium state-of-being compounds my turmoil – at what point will I be able to consider myself to be a competent graduate student, leave alone, a researcher?

To me, the development of my academic faculties comes at a very large cost. I am struggling to hone my (supposed) intellect in an ever-changing environment because I’ve convinced myself that my memory and analytic skills are failing so miserably that I can’t cope with being in a classroom anymore. This weakens my confidence in myself and leads me to denigrate myself in an academic crowd. I constantly feel like a fool by asking what seem to me to be stupid questions, and I wonder if I should already be knowing something that I ask about. I wonder if this is just a manifestation of wanting to spend class-time on research instead.

The only way out for me at this point is, as my nears and dears put it, to ‘plod along’, but to me that is akin to being mediocre at some level, and I get overwhelmed with the vicious cycle that I see myself in. How am I supposed to convince myself that I am worthy of any good thing if I feel I don’t deserve it because I cannot make or do good things? Advice from those around me has always been to the tune of getting rest or distracting myself from the slog that is my everyday-life but everyone knows, including me, that this is temporary solution to a recurrent problem. Unfortunately for me and for those who care, my frustrations and problems lack definition, and may just be multiple concomitant  changes that everyone undergoes and handles ‘normally’ in life that I have chosen to make a big deal out of, thanks to unsatisfied intellectual and emotional desires.

By continuing to introspect, I feel that I risk raising a soul-consuming chimera. To do myself a favour by stopping at this point and ‘plodding along’ with my life might just be the right thing to do since that seems to be best option on my table right now. This exercise of typing out my thoughts was like putting fog-lamps on a car during inclement weather, with the knowledge that although the fog may not be hindering my vision now, the road is still iced over and the car skids with fearful ease.

I must drive safely.