I’m Feeling Weird

I can’t tell you how many journal entries I’ve started with the words, “I feel weird.” What I mean is that I feel a way that I can’t explain. There’s no simple category; I’m not mad, sad, lonely, depressed, or happy. Maybe I am all of those things, but I don’t feel them in the way we’ve all been taught, especially with the help of literature and movies, to think of them.

This time it totally snuck up on me. They’re doing some work on my apartment, so I’m hanging out in the library. This isn’t the library I work at and spend a lot of time studying. This is the library I used to work and spend a lot of time studying.

Without thinking, I walked upstairs and headed for my normal corner. I swear just the smell of the place took me somewhere else. I’ve spent a lot of time in this library over the last two years, but what came back to me today was my first year here. I didn’t find the transition to grad school a difficult one academically; it was a step up, for sure, and it has built up now so that I’m producing a quality of work I had no idea I was capable of. What so often sent me fleeing for the library in that first year was not academics, but emotions.

It’s hard for me to explain, because I can’t quite remember what I was thinking. I was just feeling a lot. I am a very emotional person, but I don’t match that stereotype of the emotional mess incapable of reason. At the same time that I am extremely emotional, and a total dreamer, I am also very practical. I don’t think reason and feeling are as different as we make them out to be. For me, everything is emotional–what I think, what I study, the music I listen to, my work, my relationships.

And, it’s the feelings that come back to me now as I sit in this place where I’ve spent so much time in the last two years. I recall from somewhere in my gut the many things I sat here thinking and feeling. Here is where I wrestled with theological issues, eventually coming to accept a theology/world view that is so right to me that it’s not enough to say I accepted it intellectually–I accepted it with my whole person, and it wasn’t completely voluntary.

I sat here coming to terms with the decision I made to make this study my life. Now I can’t imagine choosing anything else, but practical as I am, it was hard for me to make this decision. The safe path was finding myself a real job or studying in a field where jobs aren’t so scarce. I took the risk instead. I’m pursing a very expensive education for the dream of getting a professorship where I will be paid less than a lot of college drop outs. As my sister sums it up, “So, we’re going to have to call you Dr., but we’ll still have to pick up the tab for lunch?” That’s right.

I sat here feeding my silly thoughts about a boy by listening to too much Snow Patrol and The Fray.

I sat here asking myself the question, do I really have the courage to continually challenge myself and face my fears about not being smart, talented, outgoing enough?

I sit here now thinking that I’ve come a long way in the last two years. I’m smarter. I’m a better writer. I’ve made connections and built relationships. But, mostly I’m more confident in both my abilities and the decisions I’ve made. It feels good.

If circumstances hadn’t brought me to this space full of memories today, my thoughts never would have gone there alone. Sometimes being overly emotional is a gift more than it’s a burden. Sometimes.

Also, Happy Halloween!