Nox Amicus

The air is clearing, the sun is starting to peek its head out of the haze, and I’m taking some time to catch my breath. It’s been a long four years in the land of Noxiousness – but the time has come to turn corners and turn pages – and to take stock of where I’ve been.

I’ve learned a great deal about myself in the past eight months. That’s significant only because I thought all of these recently learned lessons were already behind me. Apparently there’s some kind of bizarre life crash-course where, while you have the basis for the things you need to know, you have to prove you can implement it.

I didn’t figure this out until the last three months – when school prompted me to do the same thing. The senior project cycle was a series of courses that required you to take all of the things you’d learned in the core curriculum and actually make them work in the real world. That’s probably great when you’re 22 and living on campus and school can be your only focus. But when you have family stresses, friends, a full time job, a part-time business, three bands, a CD project, and a novel in progress – there comes a time to make some tough choices. One of the bands is gone, the part-time business is on hiatus, and work has slowed to a crawl on both the CD and book. In many ways, I felt like I was in command of a starship – “diverting auxiliary power to the shields captain!!” – problem was, no one taught me how to run a starship.

I threw a lot of elements in my life to auto-pilot… something that was actually recommended to me by a dear friend when this whole school thing began. I actually thought that I could follow my own path, offer explanations when necessary, and have everything be stable on the other side. I thought I could retreat and come back out. It’s a trend of mine – much like a turtle, I crawl into a shell and poke my head back out every now and then. It’s an established pattern that might not work for everyone, but sometimes it’s what I’ve needed to do.

But then there come the expectations. We all do it. We base our perception of other people on what we would like them to be – we interact with them that way – and as long as they come close to our expectation, we’re fine. It’s like some fantasy quantum bubble ‘you have enough of what I need, just don’t pop the bubble!’ I’ve had my bubble burst several times in the past year – as recently as last week in fact. I’ve regrettably burst my share of bubbles too. It sucks, and there’s pain, and there’s loss – and there shouldn’t be… but there has to be. It’s times like these that emotions suck.

So now I look out over the landscape, and I periodically wave to and wave back at friends… but that’s all. For now, I think it’s best to just sit quietly and see what kind of equilibrium forms and how much my ‘life’ can recover from the hell and isolation I put it through.

I feel I should say that I’m not fishing for comments. I really don’t expect many, if any, people to read this. I just really wanted to put a mile-marker in the ground to keep track of where I am and where I’m going. If you happened upon this though, thank you for reading!!

I wish you health and peace!!