Baggage, The Blank Slate, and the Words of Whitman

          From kindergarten up until a year or two ago, I was set on going to Stanford and becoming a successful lawyer. I was keen on dominating the court room and becoming passionate in the inter-workings of people, words and powerful ideas.
         
         The past few years, though, life hit me hard, and I came to look at myself harshly, deeming myself unworthy for things of greatness of any sort. I thought myself ignorant, slow, unqualified, unmotivated, ugly, and worst of all, insignificant... even, at times, non-existent.
         
          I crashed and burned and folded in on myself. I read and wrote and sang, but more often than not, I could be found in the dark in some corner of my room: knees folded, arms encircling them, head tucked in between, bawling over my lack of use.
         
          I felt such great sadness for the prospect of not being able to give back to the world, for not having anything to show for the gifts bestowed upon me. I even acknowledged the fact that my crying was a show of weakness, a lack of proper respect for TIME and the fact that I was wasting it, and a LOT of it. I felt anxious. Fast, I had to move fast. I couldn't. I was stuck. I was sick all the time from stress and ill thought and lack of sleep imposed on myself BY myself. I would lend out a helping hand to the ones I loved, be it to watch my brothers or help a friend with a paper, or to exist as an open heart and listening ear. I was weak, though, but I was too ashamed to admit it. I denied defeat even though my parents and my friends and my teachers could see glimmers here and there of my drowning in my own pool of self-doubt and pity and emotional wreckage.

          I would like to say that one day I woke up and the sun shone and that everything was okay, but it wasn't. It was a series of days and weeks and months that required a living, breathing effort. It was a process, like that of writing. It was the transformation not only of an attitude and a supposed "truth", but a mind. The beauty in the breakdown was that anything could be sprung up in such rubble. New bridges and connections and aspirations and ideas of what happiness and purpose really meant.

          "Transformation, not Transaction." "It's not always about the destination, but the journey." That sort of thing.

          Nowadays, life is as crazy and busy as before, but through experience and full-fledged effort in being self-aware, through the reading of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman and Tess of D'Urbervilles and Speaker For The Dead and White Oleander and many many many other books, through the watching of hundreds upon hundreds of films, through the composition and immersion of thousands of songs, I have grown more appreciative and, hopefully, more optimistic than ever before. Without denying the darkness of the world, I recognize the points of light that peak out here and there, the people that are beautiful and whole. I have learned what it is to be whole, what it truly means to be WHOLESOME.

          A blank slate is what college will be for me, a new life away from the one I have thus far lived. Much like my personal statement, I was a baby. Then, I was a child. Then, I was a teenager. I do not pretend to be an adult. I am still a child. A child I am, but not for long. I look forward to putting myself to good use, to letting in all the light of others through the cracks that are my glorious faults!

       
 ~As my next post, I will quote what I deem to be beautifully useful and relate-able lines from various authors (:

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