Underwhelmed

It's been nearly two months since I came back from my various travels and my time in Africa. The cultural readjustment hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be mostly, I think, due to my long, winding road home. However, now I'm faced with the difficulties of living in a place so closely associated with my past and a person with whom I no longer identify.

That person is the old me, and I guess I shouldn't say that I no longer identify with him. It's very difficult for me to be sedentary. Before I left for Africa, I used to get restless, but I could usually distract myself in some way through television or video games, etc. Now, I can't bring myself to take hold of these former distractions. Living without them for nearly three years, I've forgotten how to live with them. As a result, my days have opened up considerably. Filling all those extra hours is the new challenge.

One would think that this is a good thing, and in many ways, it is. I can focus on really grinding through work for the classes I'm taking, buckle down on grad school applications, and get a little light reading and writing done in the spare time in between. However, the reality is that too much free time allows my brain to run wild.

I've had a lot of experience being completely overwhelmed by external forces. My senior year in undergrad, I applied for dean's permission to take six classes, two of which were senior capstone courses, one was a directing class that took up all my time both spare and the time I should have used for basic necessities like bathing, sleeping, and eating. I developed an eye twitch for the month we were in production, but I still somehow managed to walk away from that semester intact. I believed if I could survive that, I could survive anything. The momentum from that semester carried me through comprehensive exams and a double distinction. In Niger, I faced evacuations, dysentery, culture shock, corruption, and any number of other x factors with quite a bit of stress but no lasting side effects (caused by stress anyway, I'm sure the parasites left their mark). Again, if I could survive that, I could survive anything.

The point is that I can handle pressure very well. In fact, I thrive under pressure. It forces me to allocate my resources and really push myself to succeed. What I'm beginning to learn at home, however, is that I cannot handle the feeling of being surrounded by options but without any clear goal of how to take advantage of them. I feel like I'm completely underwhelmed at home, like I've just done all these things, reached the end of the road, and now I'm faced with a variety of paths but no clear idea of where any of them lead. It's frustrating, but worse, it throws my brain into overdrive trying to work out all the details of my options. My mind thrives on possibilities, gorging itself on them like a kid with too many sweets, and as one would expect, consuming too many sweets will eventually make one sick.

I've always overanalyzed, but usually the crazy part of me is held in check by the need to make a decision in some manageable time frame. Now, without any set schedule or itinerary, and stuck at home where I don't have to worry too much about material matters, I feel like I'm just drifting. Time is passing by, I can feel it, but I don't feel like I'm getting any closer to anything I want to do. I feel trapped by an imagined cycle of "If I want this job, I need to do grad school, but in order to get into grad school, I need more experience in the field that I can't get into because I don't have the degree." My brain kicks in and I start thinking about things that have no bearing on my present (like whether I want to study in New York or London, living opportunities, how I'll afford either, what the volunteer opportunities are there, etc.). All of these are future hurdles that I'll have to jump when the time comes, but I can't seem to differentiate present concerns with future. As a result, everything seems more pressing than it is. I get into these moods where my brain just starts grinding and grinding like a computer processor running too many programs at once. It's so busy with all these other things that it can't run even the simplest of tasks without crashing horrifically. Eventually, it's going to burn out.

All this wouldn't be too awful if I had people, events, exciting things to distract me. I love my parents, but I can't get too excited by hanging out with them. I need some peers as well as parents, people who I can relate to, people who share my interests. Unfortunately, there aren't any around. It's part of the fact that rural America has had huge problems with brain drain for years now. There are no jobs, no opportunities for students who've really pushed and excelled throughout high school and college. The only young people that I know in my community are the burnouts, those who've gotten married young, those who are already through a kid or two. I don't mean to sound elitist in any way, but how can I identify with someone with whom I share almost nothing? Just because we went the the same high school, grew up in the same small town, it doesn't mean much. We were already moving apart from one another when they separated the accelerated math and english classes back in junior high. The only thing we share is a background, and that background is only shared by someone looking from the outside. Within the community you have all those stereotypical high school roles. I was a nerd. All the other nerds are gone; they're doing things with their lives outside of rural Indiana. A lot of the burnouts, the ones who used to give me hell because my mother was a teacher, are still here. But we took our separate paths long ago.

I start to go crazy when there aren't people around. I'm like a puppy. I need lots of attention, or at the very least, I need someone around who I can chat with almost non-stop. If I don't speak my mind, speak it out loud, the words get trapped inside my head, and coherent ideas become jumbled as they whirl around in such a tight space. If I'm not writing or speaking constantly when my brain shifts into these high energy periods, I'm paralyzed by hours and hours of confused thought. It's not quite an anxiety attack, but I guess that's about as close as you can get. I've figured that I'm not writing nearly enough these days, so this entry is an attempt to fix that and give anyone who's interested an idea into what the readjustment process has been like for me: namely, I've been overwhelmed by underwhelming circumstances.