It has been a week or two of novel sensations.
The other day, I finished what I needed to do for the morning and then realized I had nothing to do for the rest of the day. It was genuine leisure, and I was honestly floored by the nearly narcotic sensation that washed over me. I wasn’t even borrowing personal time from myself, which I would have to pay back the following day with significant interest: I just didn’t have anything left that needed doing.
It was the best contact high I’ve had in years.
I will, for the sake of clarity, state something for the record: graduate school has eaten my life.
Here
I am living in one of the most beautiful cities and landscapes in the US, and I
feel like I haven’t been able to enjoy any of it. It wasn’t just the work, which took a drastically
different form from my nine to five of the last four years: I have a very small
cohort, very few of whose members I like.
Everyone in my year is fresh out of college, and periodically over the
last few months, I have wanted to put my hand over my eyes and say to them, “Children,
please go to your separate corners—Mommy hasn’t had her cocktail yet.” I miss Boston. I miss feeling like a person, which (as I
have learned) is not necessarily compatible with being a graduate student.
I
had to find a panic place in my new apartment.
In my apartment in Boston, there had been a space between the kitchen
cabinets and the wall immediately inside the doorway, and I would curl up there
to weep and wail. Similarly, here in
Boulder, the space between my kitchen drawers and my dishwasher is exactly the
right distance in which to sit, with my feet against the drawer pulls, and try
to keep the sadness and panic at bay, usually without good results. I had never realized it until someone pointed
it out, but not only was I unhappy in my program, but I felt as though somehow
I was failing additionally at not being ecstatically happy in Boulder—isn’t
that what people do here?
It
has been, to put it briefly, a very rough several months.
That is, until the end of this last semester.
With
my final papers turned in and last exams given, taken, and graded, I found
myself able to sleep again; to not feel guilty or budgeted in my free time, of
which there has been a significant increase.
My occupation this summer is researching and volunteering at a barn, and
I can essentially fall off the face of the earth as far as my program is
concerned.
The
bliss is monumental, and I am finally starting to feel like myself again.
At
the invitation of a friend who was participating in the event, I attended a
very Boulder-esque lecture series tonight, at which people have five minutes to
discuss, with automatically advanced slides, anything they want. The topics ranged from small town nerdhood to
saving the trees through a poetic adaptation of Dr. Seuss. And one talk was on the joys of being
awkward.
I
knew I liked this person as soon as he started talking, speaking up for the bad
rap that “awkward” has gained. He was
intensely charismatic and very funny, and by the end of his five minutes, I was
completely smitten. I looked for him
afterwards, with little success, until I bumped into him completely by accident
at the after party.
Standing
there in my blue dress with my blue pixie cut, I believe I said the following
to this complete stranger:
“Oh
my gosh—you’re brilliant! I would like
to hug you. Would that be okay?”
He
assented gracefully to being hugged, and we chatted for a while about this start-up. Being up close to him was even worse: he was
the perfect height, scruffy, and had a wonderful smile. He offered me his email so I could get more
information about some of his company’s upcoming events. Having been hysterically (and thankfully,
silently) trying to figure out how to get his contact info, I settled for email
rather than phone.
When
I got home a little while later, I found myself prowling around my apartment
with what turned out to be a really goofy smile on my face.
It
was a miracle: I not only had the joy of leisure, but somehow I had also found
a real live crush. This is what being
human feels like. I had nearly
forgotten.
I
know myself well enough to know that this euphoria probably won’t last. I will need to get down to business and start
my research eventually, and the odds are that my sudden and intense crush will
mirror awkwardly onto what was probably just networking for him (the
awkwardness, at least, will have the sting of irony).
But
this week of free time, this electronic charge of a crush: I have missed these
feelings. They feel oddly hopeful; they
remind me of the person I usually am, under non-graduate circumstances, and I’m
surprised how much I missed that person. She is not nearly as self-loathing as the
person I’ve warped into over the last several months. I also remind myself that potentially one of
the best parts of these feelings is that they're fleeting: crushes crush and
leisure turns to boredom. But right now,
here in this perfect set of days, I am sleeping, I am crushing, I am sparkling,
and I am thinking about lines from a song that seem to sum it up perfectly:
Hello my old heart, how have you been? Are you there still there inside my chest?
I’ve been so worried,
you’ve been so still, barely beating at all…
Because nothing lasts
forever, some things aren’t meant to be,
But you’ll never find
the answers, until you set your old heart free.
