Ramblings of a freedom drunk grad student…

14 Dec Ramblings of a freedom drunk grad student…

I realized that I promised an update yesterday and my night was encroaching it’s end…so here I am…it’s your lucky night.

Wow…it has been a ridiculously long time since I sat here and sent my thoughts into the wide open void that is the World Wide Web. So a quick update on where I’ve been…

RGU.

What is RGU you ask? Do you not remember? Richmont Graduate University…the place which has inhaled my life for the past 3 1/2 mos. It’s a crazy but beautiful thing. The good news is…I survived. Believe it or not, I survived my first semester of graduate school! I honestly didn’t believe that I would make it. I have been voicing these concerns for the past few weeks (and/or months) and it wasn’t because I hoped that people would affirm me and counter my negative concerns so that I would feel good about myself. No…this my friends, was pure fear. Fear of failure. And who knows…maybe failure would have been a good thing for me. Fortunately, we won’t be finding out this semester if I big whopping tablespoon of failure would do me good or not…because I did it. And did it well.

The other side of the tunnel…well it looks a lot more promising. It is incredible to think how much I have learned and absorbed in the past few months. It hasn’t even been six months. I think six months is a reasonable amount of time to experience a monumental change in your life, but alas, it has been only close to four.

What I think I have learned most this semester is how little I really know. Sounds bizarre, no?

The more that I think I have people, life, a situation, a relationship, God, the universe, whatever….figured out the more that I realize I have only scratched the surface. I was talking to the boy the other day about how quick people are to just and the slippery slope of being ego-centric. It’s funny to think that every person has thousands, millions, even billions (?) of continuous thoughts streaming through their cortex and synapses…both the conscious and subconscious…and we get only the tiny piece of the verbal and nonverbal a person gives us. Their own tiny act for the world to see. I say act because…isn’t that exactly what it is for most people? The person you think you should be…strive to be…etc. How many people in the world actually get to see your heart? Knowing your own personal answer to that question…how many people do you think you actually get to see their heart?

So why is it that we think we can judge people based on seconds of interaction? Not that I’m claiming to be exempt from this. It’s just easy to do. We like to classify people. It makes us feel better to know where someone fits in our world view. So we observe, calculate, connect, and place them in their appropriate box so as to not rock our world upside down.

{Side note}
My mother was watching Bones the other night (the show with the ridiculous smart and ridiculously socially awkward brilliant scientist that studies…bones). I as usual was not watching the show…but after catching one intriguing clip stayed to find out what happened. They were talking about the brain…apparently there was this experiment done where they gave a group of people glasses to make them see the world upside down. So they lived with the world view of being upside down…until the third day when everything appeared right side up again. The world was back in order (*applause for our smart brains*). But when they took the glasses off the world was upside down again…until the third day when again, everything was back to normal. It only takes three days for your brain to ‘fix’ itself…crazy! I know.

Back to my story…so if your brain can take the upside down view of the world and make it right even when optically you should see it wrong…what else can your brain trick you in to…? Feelings, emotions, judgments, opinions, thoughts, intuitions, impulses…what can really be trusted?

My friends and I have spent the last few months digging up the past and previous events that make for our current feelings, judgments, thoughts, and values….and enrolling in therapy to deal with the truth of that. It’s funny…we’ve concluded…people aren’t (generally speaking) very self-aware. Would you like to know why? …Because it is hard and takes lots of hard work.

The truth…the truth may actually set you free. Free from what? …Perfection, expectations, rules, society, peer pressure, self-pressure, fear…you name it.

I don’t really think I have a point here except to say that everyone should go to grad school for a counseling program so you can shovel into your crap hole and be smacked in the face with your issues. It’s awesome. It’s liberating. It doesn’t fix things…but it starts the healing necessary to live. To really live. Ok so everyone can’t and wouldn’t enjoy doing this…but just think about it. How well do you really know you? Do you think you know ….but really have no idea? It’s possible. I’m just saying.