Sometimes I feel like I am all these completely contradictory things at the same time. Lately, I have been forgetting words. And it worries me, it does. Who wouldn't be worried if they were forgetting words? But then again, I was always obsessed with that. I realised recently, my stream of consciousness sometimes feels totally the contrary of linear. It is tangential and it jumps back and forth and I am reminded of things suddenly in the midst of other things pretty much all the time.
Last year (it still feels weird to say, finally saying goodbye forever to 2013), was a year quite unlike any other in my entire life. Firstly, I completed my first year of uni. That was....an immense different experience to the entirety of my education experience to date. It challenged me to change and grow in many more ways that I had initially anticipated, definitely. I didn't write and blog here much not for lack of things happening but rather it felt like too many things were happening consecutively, one after the other. At the beginning of the year I had aspired to step outside my comfort zone. To go where I have never been and to do what I have never done before. And I did do those things. And I experienced failures and successes and circumstances that challenged me and always reminded me of that quotation "Child, child, do you not see? Sometimes life calls you to be more than what you are". This whole idea of "being more than what you are" is so poignantly beautiful. Like reaching higher than the highest peak. To be more than ourselves, to be more than our natural capacities because that is humanity; always climbing higher than we can reach and going where no one has gone before.
The year came and went in a series of firsts. Little steps that I hoped would lead to this forever ambiguous notion of discovering myself. Sometimes I find it difficult, trying to reconcile with who I am - this girl who is obsessive over personality psychology theory, whose words hang and drip with euphemisms and discretion and never being quite to the point, in simple words tremendously cautious and dull....to just wanting to experience all the vivid colours of emotion that colour the human experience of life that I have heard so much about and lived vicariously through literature. To put it succinctly (as I am rarely), I was (and perhaps still am) simply curious about everything. About how it would to feel to make out with a guy at bar. How it would feel to live totally....vivaciously and brightly, like a shooting star, burning brightly and explosively descend like there is no tomorrow. For me, I confess there was never ever an in-between. I am a person of extremities. It's either soaring success or devastating failure. Is that so wrong to be? Unfortunately, this has not done wonders for my academic record last year because last year, I believe I had fallen so short of my standards and my expectations, than I have ever done before. I scraped it, simply. Have I always been so insufficiently committed? So I reached perhaps one of my lowest points in life last year, in these moments that seemed to recursively happen again and again and I felt this immense lack of purpose and disappointment in myself. Academic failure coupled with the inherent adversities of simply transition, new-found levels of independence and responsibility I had never been charged with before was....to put simply, overwhelming. Transition as in moving to Sydney, living on my own basically, having minimal funds and juggling uni work and many nights waitressing shifts definitely threw me off balance more than I had ever anticipated. I guess it was mostly fuelled by a very large sense of that feeling of....invincibility so common in people my age. But yes, overloading myself again is not a mistake I intend to repeat this year. And as always Aang's words to Korra always struck out to me "When we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change". Which is definitely very true for me as I feel like I'm so different from the girl I was that graduated high school in a day that feels both like yesterday and worlds away. I only hope it has been for the better.
Yesterday, I saw the screen adaption of The Book Thief with Luke."If your eyes could speak, what would they say?" is a line I think is so, so powerfully resonant from it. I loved every bit of it. Even though they cut out a few parts, as they always invariably tend to do with these movie adaptions, the film was beautiful in all it's tragicness. And of course they captured the sadness particularly well. Or as Luke so succinctly put it as the end credits rolled in "Yup, that was about just as sad as I remember it" haha. Another quotation that struck out to me was what Death was saying near the end that I thought was particularly profound and beautiful about how he witnessed humanity at its most beautiful and at its most ugly and he wondered how they could be the same.
Anyway, I'm off for work soon! I will do my best to blog more this year because I think it is good for me to write out my incoherent thoughts out sometimes. While my writing is still in-cohesive it helps, somehow.
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