Thursday, February 10, 2005

A lost soul in limbo

I am tired. And really tired.

Life took a big turn after I hired a lawyer… Well, I gotta admit that quite a bit of exaggeration.

I got to be very energetic and started thinking about positive outlooks. What have I accomplished since my last blog?

I joined three professional organizations and applied to be a reviewer for various associations. Within one week, I put up a grant proposal for a program focusing on empowering the potential positive impact of computer games, targeting youths that are at risk of dropping out of the school. I cut my “dead horse” dissertation to 30 something pages from 100 plus pages, with the wishful thinking that I might be able to submit it to some dead horse journals. Today, I finally submitted the final draft of my dissertation to my advisor. In between the jobs and all that jazz, I am managing to get an A from this statistics class about multilevel analysis.

I had gotten home a bit early today. Arrived at about 8:30 and decided to watch the film “Mystic Pizza”. Ya. That’s a chick movie but I think it did somehow touch my heart. In the movie, Julia Roberts acted as a young woman who used faul language and was supposed to be considered as a slut. At one scene, when her mother mentioned to her that she did not want her to be an academic kind and just wanted her to make something out of herself, Julia Roberts replied, “I am worried about myself, too.”

That sounds far too familiar to me. That’s exactly the same feeling I have been secretly holding about myself.

When am I going to find a job? When will I start feeling settled and no longer like a rootless plant that floats along the flow of water? And when will I find a partner to share with me our lives (even though this should be the last of my concern at this stage just like quitting smoking)?

These questions haunt me like nightmares and all that I could do is to dig my head into projects after projects to bury my fear and insecurities deep down in my heart.

I often wonder what my life would have turned out to be shall I have not let myself gone with my dreams and started a pseudo-nomadic life for the past 10 years. I managed to call Vancouver my home before I started identifying myself as a New Yorker.

Or, how life would have turned out if I had gone into medical school rather than digging into the black box of human psychology?

I used to be able to say that, if I could change my life and start all over again, I would not make a change. Now, the rootless plant is a lost soul in Limbo. She knows no more.