Sometimes I love the feeling of being excessively caff'd up. Kind of like how I enjoy being inebriated enough where I feel like I can say anything I'm thinking without consequence, having enough caffeine in my system makes me want to purge my mind and write about myself.
So I'll just write about what's on my mind.
I have this professor who at first I found no interest in, until I realized how odd she is. I find myself relating to her characteristics and hope that my development becomes stabilized to a point where it is similar to the one she exudes. Not exactly, because I still definitely want to be me, but just so that I turn out okay in the end. Maybe she can be my weird character-uplifting role model. I can't explain why anyone would want to look up to someone as bizarre as I think this professor is, but something tells me that she's just doing her own thing and really enjoys it. That's how I want to live.
Literally the first day I started school at the end of January, I uninstalled Instagram off of my phone. While I stopped posting photos several years ago, I had actively followed people that inspired me in some way (or that I felt obligated to follow). The first day of school felt like the end of my free time, so the first thing that had to go was my Instagram. I've never felt the need to do this kind of thing (like during lent, people would give up Facebook, and Facebook was never really that much of a distraction in my life to get rid of in the first place-- even more so post-college when none of your friends use Facebook anyway), but with Instagram, it was easy to criticize people. My favorite example is criticizing the notorious latte gram. I have no idea how a hot beverage has become so photogenic in social media, but it annoyed me. How many 16 year old girls really drink coffee anyway? Is a latte even considered coffee? So, it's not about the latte. It's the fact that you're at this cool industrial coffee shop drinking a $5 latte, maybe having a me day with a book or maybe with a partner in crime. In the end, any photo can appear this way. A sense of feeling like you're doing something cool with your life when you really aren't (sorry). Photos are always deceiving. My recent trip to the Catskills with Cliff looked lovely (and it was), but did I ever say what I did? No. What we did was go around an empty town where almost every shop was closed because it was Wednesday or because it was 4pm, or we awaited an encounter with racism, and spent most of our the time talking in our room. To me, that's enough coolness (well, just the latter part), but the photos probably look a lot cooler than all the talking we did (I mean, I think they look "cool"? Maybe they don't...). Point in case, I didn't mean to look cool if you even thought it was cool, but it probably came off that way. Or I think back on my summer blog a few years ago and I remember many people telling me that I must have done a million things that year, but I didn't. I just happened to have my camera with me all the time and documented walking to a restaurant or documented when a friend came to drop off Dayquil. In many photos, I had probably just finished crying over all the awful shit that happened that summer, but you wouldn't know it. You get what I'm saying? It wasn't meant to be what it appeared to be. So anyway, after I left Instagram, I got over the bulk of my cynicism of it. And I no longer judge people who post pretentious photos (according to me).
As a social worker, I have to remain objective in every situation. I thought I was a fairly objective person when it came to listening to people's stories, but I recently discovered that I'm not. And-- duh-- most people aren't. There's usually a tinge of partiality in your values that you might not notice. That's fine, for the average person. But for my profession, I have to be aware of myself at all times. It's something I thought I never struggled with, but severely do. This is why I thought I'd be a good social worker-- because I have these false preconceptions about myself being good at things that I'm really not entirely skilled at just yet. And so I'm not a good social worker and come home feeling defeated 90% of the time, but I know that my clinical skills have only been active for about three months. There's a learning curve for everything.
Today I realized I need to stop thinking wholly. I mean, that I need to start thinking in chunks. I used to do this pretty well when I was working, but after starting school, everything feels more like one big blur. Especially with an accelerated program, there's no such thing as breaks and there's really no differentiation between first year and second year, or even first semester and second semester. I need to think piece by piece in order to practice self-care. Right now, it's not about overcoming the summer semester, it's about finishing this spring semester well. And before I start the summer semester, I need to relax. And then I can freak out about summer.
