I'm confused about a lot of stuff. It really is a myth that you can get anywhere without working extremely hard to get it. I am not satisfied with anything. I feel so unsophisticated now, and I used to pride myself on my sophistication.
I don't fit well into this life. I have "delusions of grandeur." I'm so expendable at my job. I try to content myself with this stupid job, but the problem is that when I'm there I wish that I could be indispensable and that my work was really valued, but that is not the case.
For a while I tried to convince myself that a career in computer science was what I really wanted but the truth is I don't think I've ever really wanted it.
Maybe my problem is just confidence. As U2 would say I'm stuck in a moment and i can't get out of it. I always wanted to be exceptional, but now I've lowered my expectations. I guess everyone eventually discovers that all of their dreams aren't going to come true. The truth: I'm just an average student, I'm 20 years old and I have yet to do anything great.
When I was 12 years old I entered this spelling bee and won my way up to the national competition. Don't ask me how this happened. It basically happened by accident.
I believed the rest of my life would take this same pattern: that everyone would immediately recognize my natural talent and hand me a reward, without my having to work very hard to attain the reward. This worked for me up through about senior year of high school.
That year I realized something: maybe I was not as good of a student as I thought. I struggled to get A's in AP English and Pre-Calculus, where before I had earned them with hardly any effort at all. I started applying to colleges with the idea that I would be able to earn a nice scholarship to a prestigious university. I always figured that I would go somewhere excellent and far, like Harvard or Stanford, or to a nice liberal arts college.
Problems appeared. I was dismayed when I realized I had very few extracurricular activities to put on my application. My grades were good, but how could I compete with all those student council presidents and Academic Decathletes? Forget Harvard- I finally decided it would be great if I could go to UT-Austin.
Looking back, I think I should have just gone for it. I was accepted to UT (automatically, in fact, because I was in the top ten percent of my class), and I received a $3,000-a-year scholarship. I visited the university and I felt pretty comfortable there. A lot of my classmates were going there. I had family about three hours away.
So what was holding me back? Fear, mostly, but other things, too:
- the snobbery of it all- Mom's advice- "Just get the piece of paper." All the snobs from Franklin High were going there. They were exactly the people I wanted to escape.
- financial concerns- I had the scholarship, but what about room and board, travel expenses, books, etc.?
- I had never lived by myself before, and here I would be in a strange city among strange people, living in a huge dorm.
So I got cold feet. Not that those aren't valid concerns, but years later I feel like I pitched the culmination of my high school achievement in the trash can. I ended up at the local university and continued living at home. It's not so much that I'm extremely dissatisfied with what happened in my life after that or that I think all the awful things that have happened since then could have been avoided. It's more that I went against what I wanted to do in my heart, and made a decision based on what I thought was practical. A head vs. heart decision, and I went with the head.