So – Now What?

Since I’m not gonna be a student any more (at least not right now – unless I think of something better to do in the interim, I’ll give it another go next year) the question arises: what will I do with myself?

On a practical level I’ll have to defer. The March 31 deadline is fast approaching.

Then, since I won’t be eligible for Austudy any more, I’ll have to get another job. I have some reserves and one casual job (which is so cruddy I’m disinclined to talk about it, even here). But that only nets me about $300 a fortnight, not nearly enough to live on. A separate post about that may be in order, I think.

First, though, I’m going home to Canberra for a visit. I haven’t been back since I moved in November, and it will be interesting to see what it feels like to go ‘home’. Also, marking this turning point with a temporary change of setting seems like the thing to do.

On a more fundamental level, what I’m going to do is FUCKING RELAX. I haven’t really been able to relax in so long. I’ve missed it so much.

If necessary, I’ll worry about practical problems as and when they emerge. But I’ve resolved to STOP worrying constantly – about the past, the future, other people, about my lack of an Identity, about the State Of My Life etc etc blah blabbity blah BLAH. To stop taking everything so excrutiatingly seriously all the time – and try enjoy just being alive as much as I can.

I’m going to keep going to the gym regularly, and learning to drive, which I started doing a few weeks ago.

I’m going to continue persuing my involvement in Neurocam, and blogging about it.

I’m going to photos with the unwanted old digital camera my sister gave me the other day.

I’m going to read books and watch movies.

I’d previously not felt as though I had time to do those last two things. I’ve been reading a bit, but at a farcically slow rate (I’m currently less that halfway through “The Magus”, which I picked up on the 15th of Feb), because of an inability to concentrate on anything so trivial as reading a book. Prior to starting school, it was because I was constantly distracted by a nagging voice in my head saying “Why are you WASTING VALUABLE TIME reading this trivial book (slash-taking this trivial bath-slash-talking to this trivial person-slash-doing this trivial grocery shopping-slash-[insert whatever I was doing here]) – YOU HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO ABOUT YOUR LIFE!!” Since I started school it’s been all the uni work I should have been doing that’s distracted me instead. And when I was studying, it was all the other studying I wasn’t doing that distracted me. God it’s been horrible.

Since my epiphany, I’ve recognised this mindset for the entirely malevolent influence that it is. These sorts of thoughts may still emerge from time to time, but I feel at liberty now to tell them to fuck off. It’s incredibly liberating. I’ll be able to just, y’know, enjoy reading a book. It’s gonna be great.

A lot of my reading and movie watching, will probably revolve rediscovering material that I’ve previously loved or found important, and seeing what it means to me now, if anything.

I’m going to have fun being in the moment and doing what I want to do – but hopefully, in the process, discovering a new way (or new ways) to be. That sounds so pretentious. I’ve become very pretentious.

And, finally, I’m going to blog about all of this. This blog will be a document of my active development of a new self. Although it will serve as an outlet for reflection and the autopsying of old selves as well – in a more tangible, contained, and hopefully productive a way than just going over things in my head endlessly endlessly endlessly, as I’d been doing previously and torturously and most unproductively.

The blogging may involve a certain amount of autobiographical digging over the past, self-anal-isis and introspection, and also classically bloglike day-to-day banality about food and domestica and assorted trifles. I make no apologies for this. I hope to attract some readers – this is, after all, another reaching-out-to-the-world exercise – but I won’t be writing with the objective of pleasing an audience. Any audience who may happen to read this: consider yourself warned.

I reserve the right to change my mind about anything I may say here, and to contradict myself as much as I feel like.