March 16, 2005
My Civil War
Dear friends:
It's difficult to describe how I feel right now. It is not a pleasant place to be. However, it is Spring Break, and I do have this week off, and it is wonderful (or it ought to be) to have that much free time at my fingertips. However, I am in the process of wasting my break, for the most part. I've read one book, watched a movie, gotten very involved for three or four days in arguments on WatchBlog (for which I've currently lost my steam), and I'm trying to get interested in beating Legend of Zelda again, with a few more challenges and twists.
I am also flat-out running from my sense of duty and the ominous knowledge that I really ought to be working like mad to catch up. In most of my classes, my falling behind hasn't been that severe yet. The most dangerous place I'm falling behind is the Phoenix project. I honestly have contributed virtually nothing to the project all semester, have spent virtually no time on it, and am almost as clueless today as I was when I first joined the project last January. It's eating me alive, as I try to avoid the fact that I have done nothing. It cannot go on like this; there will be a price to pay. More than that, this is probably the most important thing I'm doing this semester; it's not some class where the professor doesn't really honestly care if you turn the paper in or not, it is a project in which the lack of involvement of one of its members creates a very real hole. Thank God, the Phoenix project does not actually need me. But I am failing it. And something has to be done about it.
I feel now like I'm always carrying the weight of my shame and guilt for the mistakes I'm making, particularly those in schoolwork. It's eating at me, day and night. I try to escape, try to find things to do that can ease the pain or make me forget. I throw myself into reading various ideas, I play video games, I read books, I try to quiet the pain. It hurts.
Why? Why don't I stop running, turn around, pick up the slack, and work? What has happened to my strength and will to do my homework? Why won't I just do it? I don't know. I really don't know for sure why. I can conjecture, I can guess, but I'm not sure. I suppose I could simply say that I don't want to. I don't want to turn around and work like mad. I don't want to dedicate myself to filling in the pit I've dug. Why not? I don't know.
Part of it is the fact that I've spent so many years of my life under the lash of my own academic expectations. I have been pushed so long and so hard by my relentless desire for academic glory. And now I'm saying to myself No! I don't want to be like this anymore. I don't want to be driven by a desire for perfect grades. Maybe what's happening to me is my attempt to force myself to change. I wonder if what is happening is something of a deliberate effort on my part to fail, to humiliate myself, to kill the part of me that so longs for perfection. I wonder if I'm trying to perform surgery on myself to remove the tumor of academic perfection. If so, the effort is probably doomed to failure - as I've said, half-jokingly, no man has root access to his soul. I cannot change motivations and desires. I can alter my own behavior, but I cannot directly change myself from the inside out.
Part of me longs to put my life back together. To live by the rules that I lived by for so long - get up early, have devotions, get your homework done on time, never miss an assignment or a class ... so many simple rules I lived by to near perfection. Part of me wants very much to live by those rules again. Part of me doesn't. I don't want to dedicate myself to living by the rules because I don't want to be obsessed by them. I don't want the Pharisee in me to come back to power. I don't want the arrogance welling up inside me that thinks I'm doing pretty well for myself, thank you kindly! No one can live without discipline.
Finally, part of me wonders what God is doing in all this. I wonder if He Himself is using this period of struggle and despair to root out the weeds in my soul that compete with my longing for Him. Part of me wonders if He's the one holding my life at a crisis point until something inside my stubborn heart gives way and lets Him in. I wonder if it's Him that has put such a monkey wrench into the gears of my life. I hope it is, because then I know that I can trust Him to finish His work and to use it for good.
I just don't know anything for sure. I feel as close to miserable as I have ever been, not knowing what the right course is. Should I strive to put my life back in order? Part of me screams "YES!" and part of me shouts back "NO!" Part of me is convinced that I am pushing myself toward the brink in some suicidal frenzy like Captain Ahab, and that the solution is to fling myself back from the edge and try to live the way I used to. Part of me is convinced that something deep and ugly is being exorcized from within, and that the call I feel to order is a siren call from Satan, who wants me to get off the operating table before the tumor is excised.
This I can see for pretty much sure - if nothing changes, this will be my worst semester ever. I will fail the Phoenix project. That, at least, is not acceptable. Something has to change. I just wish I was sure what.
One thing I am going to do - go to bed now. Good night!
