my own Self

Today I felt a feeling that I had not experienced in a long time. Like all feelings, it is not tangible, and therefore, can not be expressed in words, but nonetheless, I will try. College. The ideal of college is, in American society, supposed to be a second coming of age for budding adults, the age of responsibility. Students are expected to have their share of fun, but also maintain a strong well-rounded academic life, which centers around working toward their career goals.

Well when I went away to college, I was working on something, but it sure wasn't my career goals. How could it be. I was a journalism BS major, which to me was B.S. for bullshit.

Half the time I was wasting away in margarita ville, which usually also included smoking enough pot to give an anorexic the munchies and snorting codeine or cocaine or whatever I could get off of some one's desk. When I wasn't fucked up I was in paranoid stages of a nervous breakdown, or so depressed that I could barely even lift my head from the pillowcase, and I suppose that's where the feeling of unnameable dread came in.


Before I dropped out in the middle of my fourth semester, I carried around a feeling of unnameable dread all of the time. I hated being there. I hated my boogers freezing in the cold winter air. I hated drinking. I hated smoking. And mostly, I hated that I couldn't do either because part of my sanction from my lovely outpatient rehab facility that the school had enforced upon me included random drug tests.

I would call up my mother and told her that I hated it there, that I couldn't wait to see them. I think the time when the ball finally broke was when I got arrested for calling some girl that I didn't even know when I was drunk and threatening to kill her.

The feeling of unnameable dread is that horrible feeling when you know that you aren't where you want to be and you feel like you are so far away from the path that leads to it. Or maybe you feel like the path doesn't exist. Maybe you'll feel like you'll never get anywhere, and you deserve it. You think you're crazy. You think you're stupid. You think that you're a drug addict, an alcoholic and a slut. But most of all, you think you're never going to get any better.

And this feeling, it isn't gradual. It's not like a wave that comes over me at random times in my life. It was like a parasite, always there, feeding upon my happiness and turning it to pain, infecting me. And I knew that it was there. I knew that I should have gone to the doctor and had the parasite removed, but I felt like I couldn't leave.

But you know what, I came home. I came home and got a good job with an amazing ex-dentist, now-lawyer. And I also got other good things in certain aspects of my life. I stopped slutting around. I stopped doing pills. I still drink, but not nearly as much, and I only smoke pot occasionally.

But you know what, regardless of what I do or don't do or did or didn't do or any combination thereof, I grew up. And most people will tell you that so much growing up is done in college and it makes you smarter or more well rounded or whatever. But for me, college meant the feeling of unnameable dread. I came home and the feeling of unnameable dread still descends upon me sometimes, but never as much as it did when I was four hours away from home, stuck in the mud of the circular path that goes nowhere.

And that's something that society couldn't give me, nor could my former college town. Nor could a pill or a line or a parasite. But only my. own. self