kill your darlings

My internet is fixed now hopefully for good. It's been an arduous ten days.

Today in world history we talked about the nature of good vs. evil. I pointed out such a dichotomy’s flaws- nothing is really ever good or bad. We’re all just sort of amoral beings drifting through a universe filled with amoral things. (I feel like I couldn’t come up with the word amoral and instead said something inane like ‘abenevolent’.)

            Sometimes when I tell people I want to be a therapist they laugh. I guess it’s because I have a sort of very unnurturing and possibly even stony persona. It kind of sucks because, you know, this is sort of something I actually care about. It could be that I’m prone to antihyperbole- as in, tempering the language that I use. It’s sort of like, I don’t want to seem too excited about anything. I’m not really sure what the purpose of that is. We’re reading lord of the flies in English and I’m pretty excited about it because Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite novels. I’m a little worried everyone will hate it. I sometimes feel like people are hesitant to talk about things they really like for fear that someone will criticize it. I feel like it’s almost criminal to genuinely, unironically like something. Sometimes people think that I ‘hate everything’, which simply isn’t true. Someone who hates everything must lead a very unhappy life.

            I have a tendency towards word crutches, but only sometimes. I guess (see?) they’re sort of an expression of uncertainty, but I almost feel like it’s sort of a deliberate effort on my part. I don’t really know.

            Today I was angsting about not getting into a good university. I really only have one friend I can commiserate with about this- perhaps because we have similar dreams. Anyway, I was doing this, and my Spanish teacher- with whom I am on good terms- says to me, ‘Frances, you know something I learned in life? Everyone gets tired of the smart kids worrying about failing.’ And I see his point. But at the same time, it feels to me like somebody saying, ‘Gee, I hope I get MVP on the baseball team this year.’ And me saying, ‘Yeah, well, I suck at baseball, so I don’t think you should complain.’ Because that’s really not how things are. Some people are good at some things, and other people are good at other things. My commiserating friend is really, really good at baseball. He wants to be a doctor for the airforce possibly, and go to Stanford, and be valedictorian. He told me today something along the lines of, ‘I used to think I was smart. Then I met you.’ And of course I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t flattered. But then I thought about it some more and I felt like a prick. Because why, you know, am I making everyone else feel like they can’t be good at something? I don’t know. What I do know is that commiserating friend is really good at baseball, and really good at making friends and making people like him. And so I guess what I’m saying is that everyone is good at something. But I sometimes feel lucky that I’m good at this thing, this intangible sort of smartness thing.

But other times I don’t, because, people sometimes say, ‘well, what did Frances get on this?’ And it’s like, well, Frances failed this because she’s not actually a minor deity. She’s just a person who sometimes fails things, just less often than other people might. And sometimes people ask me my opinion on things I know nothing about, like, ‘how do you conjugate detener in preterit tense?’ or, ‘how do I find the cos of a triangle?’. And I don’t know at all. I don’t know why people think I know. I think people agree with me a lot more often than I agree with myself.

            What I’m saying is I often worry that I won’t be able to achieve MY dream. And that feels like a failure to me.