The Return to the Abyss
21:30
Sometimes, I really feel like I need a therapist. Not that I could ever afford it, but it'd be kind of nice to sit in front of a thirty-something-year-old stranger and pour out all my thoughts, fears and doubts that plague the mind, and to do it without fear of judgement or patronising advice. Because sometimes, it's hard to cope with how much goes on up there. It's like I am only capable of bottling so much in until it threatens to explode and my nights are my reprieve where I just need silence and darkness to process it all. And even then, there is the infinite feeling of being alone because no one understands the sheer weight of the mental burdens that more often than not, make me want to burn up in frustration and scream until my throat grates dry.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to second year Optometry - my second year in my own personal hell. And yes, it's only been two weeks, but the countdown to Christmas break has already begun. It pretty much began on the first day if I'm honest. Oh, the joys. This time last year, I wrote about my counting down here, when the feeling of hating my degree was fresh and raw and I was considering the very real possibility of dropping out. And then there was this post. A six-month reflection when things weren't getting better despite what everybody had promised, but I reached a point where I had accepted that it was something I simply had to do and I had to just grit my teeth and get on with it.
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| I would say the fancy equipment is at least mildly exciting amid the cloud of depression hanging over my head, but it's not. Not when I had to fork out thousands of pounds for a career I don't even want. Remind me again why I'm in this predicament? ..... Oh, right. |
For what it's worth, I stand by that; I stand by the belief that it's something I have to see through to the end but that doesn't mean that it feels okay all the time. Accepting it and being happy with it are not equivalent. There are days that aren't so bad. And by that, I mean that they're mediocre, but bearable. Maybe because we had lectures that appealed to the biochemist in me, or I didn't fail spectacularly at basic optom-ABC in clinics. Though admittedly, those days are few and far between. Then there are the days which make me feel like the world has me beaten. Those days, I come home dying for an escape. The built-up frustration at being trapped in a career I loathe and see no future in, or want no future in rather, is so heavy that it crushes me with its weight. The nagging, ever-present fear of being an incompetent optometrist is one so real that it makes my blood run cold. The suffocating thoughts of how the life I'm living is everything that I don't want eat away at my mind until it crumbles to dust. Those days, I feel like I'm losing the handle on my own life. Like I have no idea what I'm doing with it and it's just running away from me at a hundred miles an hour and when I finally catch up with it, it's going to be something that I don't recognise, something so unfamiliar from what I had imagined my life to be and so far removed from what I wish it would be - and it makes me want to smash something against the wall.
| Holding on but I keep falling back
Holding on but I keep falling back
It's driving me crazy - Still I Rise, Ilyas Mao
Hindsight is a tough pill to swallow. It truly, truly is. God, there is just so much I would do differently. And you could argue that it is what is and that there is some hidden wisdom in it that lies beneath all the layers of misery, but I can't help wondering what if. I mentally kick myself every second of every day for the choices I made - and didn't make. Balancing this, the painful dragging of my feet through each day of this degree, with trying to be patient in the knowledge that I have been destined to walk this path, is a raging war that I am losing. Because when I come home from uni wanting to burst into tears at this living, waking nightmare that has become my life, I think about how it's getting progressively worse and that maybe, possibly, I will be this unhappy and conflicted for life and it makes it difficult to breathe.
I can't tell you how it feels - knowing that you have so much to give in a field and wanting to make it your life yet feeling the love and natural knack for it being stifled and suppressed, all the while itching to break out and do something with it. Instead, there is the dull ache, a strange sensation of loss at having lost something so deeply profound that you can't put it into words. And I finally understand. That maybe that's what passion is. Something that speaks to us on some deeper, inexplicable level and when we can't have it, it always feels like our life is missing something. Something that we can't place but that defines us in one way or another. Maybe some of us never find it. Maybe some of us do, stumbling upon something that we feel drawn to, that catches our interest and you realise you could spend your life studying it, learning it, finding your way around its crooks and crevices - and you'd never get tired.
I feel it now more than ever. That pang of regret when I'm teaching my brother bits and pieces of biochemistry and in that moment right there, I am right back in my element in a heartbeat. And even if it's for a fleeting moment, I am in a world where it all makes sense. Despite the gap of time that's worn my knowledge thin, it is a language that feels as natural as breathing, one that clicks into place and as hard and complicated and complex as it is, it is a language I can decipher, make sense of, and be fluent in. It's cruel, so-cruel-it's-almost-funny how much re-visiting it makes me fall in love with it all over again.
I don't believe in living a life you're only half-living. I don't think you should be okay in settling or compromising for a life that is only a fraction of what you imagined it to be. I don't think that you should be okay in letting your dreams float away like restless balloons on a windy day, or letting the fire of your passion slowly die out to become nothing but cold embers that burn with lost hopes and forgotten chances. I refuse to believe that this is it - that this is how my life is going to be, for life. I have dreams and hopes and plans for the future that might be slightly too high on Cloud 9, but I'll be damned if I don't try to make them materialise here on earth. Life's too short to passively sit back and watch life unfold even if the creases and folds are bent up in the wrong way, trapping little pieces of us in the tiny tucks and grooves, starving us of oxygen as we cry out with no one to hear. I think we all have a little too much to give to settle for that.
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| Don't look back in 10 years time and wish you'd done things differently
I wish I could shut out and ignore the deep-rooted unhappiness that's taken hold of me, the pent-up frustration and resentment of being dragged by my hair down this route that makes me want to cry till my tears run dry, but I can't. Being thrown back into it after a four month blissful holiday when I could pretend it didn't exist is like being thrown into a bottomless pit with no cracks to let the light in and nothing to cushion the fall. And it scares me to death. It scares me that this is my future set in stone and that I could maybe, possibly, be this unhappy and confused and lost for life with a lifetime of regret being the painful reminder of what would have been, could have been, maybe, possibly should have been.
Yet. I have no intention of practising as an optometrist. It's not happening. I'm not going to succumb to optometry as my career because I swear if I do, I will be signing my death sentence. And that's the thread of sanity I'm hanging on to. The sweet promise of finding something more in my life that makes me happy and leaving behind optometry until it is nothing more than a whisper in the air is my silver lining. It's a silver lining that I cling to because if I don't, I will drive myself to madness. Although between you and I, I think I'm already halfway there.
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