February

It has become clear to me that I have piled so much on my plate this semester that I am unable to any of it to the best of my ability. This is a pretty common phenomenon, but not one that I was ever so intimately acquainted with. I was always doing "just enough", at least for the first few years of college. Now that I find myself having an interest in almost everything (sorry Economics), I am balancing projects in five sprawling disciplines that, somehow, connect. 

Poetry, playwriting, sculpture, radio mixing and life histories. I feel the impetus to be creative. I have ideas and energy and the tools. But I almost feel diluted in my effect as a person when I'm trying to employ so many mediums at once. I feel lost in the anxiety of the creative process, without the trust that its going to lead anywhere, because I'm new at everything! 

Being new at everything as a senior in college brings with it its own anxieties and feelings of inadequacy. It's not all that unfamiliar a story at Sarah Lawrence. I came back to the US from spending a year abroad strictly studying continental philosophy and ethics. I don't find it a fault that I wanted to spend a year pushing myself to create, rather than critique. But I think I did lack focus. I DO lack focus. 

I think that's been the cause of my anxiety this semester. I feel unfocused and unchanneled. Which has of course leaked into all the different aspects of my life and caused tensions and problems. But the more I remind myself that this is necessary, that this period of unknowing is just as necessary as all the steps that came before or will come after, I breath a little easier.