While I should be studying for my Biology midterm, I am finding myself in desperate need, instead, to write.
I feel as though I am in the middle of some sort of crisis: my life and outlook is at the crux of dawning on a new level. It isn't that I am overly emotional, or that I am spending extravagantly, but instead that my mind and heart seem more unsettled than ever before. I am frustrated with myself, with others, and frustrated with frustration. Moments of clarity seem to be a rare commodity for me right now—I am frustrated that I am so concerned with what is going on inside myself!
I need a new job. The fact that I work for Starbucks is irrelevant; I have become so disenchanted with my assumed role within society. In Linden, serving a cup of coffee to someone was different. The customer became a person, and I, the barista, was a person as well. At my current job, I feel as though I am meaningless and that I am surrounded by a pool of superficial nothingness. It isn't the company, it's the idealized lifestyle associated with it. Now, that said, to hear the Starbucks cutting a massive number of jobs worries me. I need my job. I have it for a reason. Working at such a flexible job enables me to go to school and work in a fairly stress-free way—something I couldn't be guaranteed at the other places I applied to. For me, Starbucks is the roof over my head, and I know that it is much the same to many other people. It frustrates me to no end that people are enjoying Starbucks' suffering—do not see that they are enjoying the suffering of the 6,700 people who will lose their jobs in an unfavourable economy? My heart struggles with not feeling resentment towards such people. Starbucks is a multinational company with a spotted ethical record, but my friend, if you are wearing Fruit of the Loom or eating any form of cash crop (bananas especially), you are participating in far more unethical treatment of human beings than you would in buying a latte at the 'Bucks.
I yearn for a job with more meaning, more effect, but am frustrated that such jobs are unavailable to me because they required full-time or times when I'm in school, or they require the degrees I'm working on getting.
I am frustrated because my courses are challenging me. I'm not acing them. I'm not even the smartest or quickest in the class. My friends and family have such high expectation on my intellect and academia, and when I fail myself in such regards, how can I ever remain confident? I'm frustrated that I care so much about these things.
I am frustrated because I feel like a paradox. I love cultures. I love helping people. I love loving. And yet I find myself resisting integration. I am inadvertently keen on retaining my Albertan/Linden identity (not that I want to forget my upbringing) that I feel like I am pushing people away. I don't really want to be alone, and yet I know that I am sometimes made weaker when I am not alone. Further still, dating and marriage are something I often find myself struggling with. The concepts perhaps not so much, but the superficial facades of both are lost on me. But I am single, so I can say such things. Forgive me.
I am frustrated because I don't understand and know everything yet, and I know that there is so much more, and so much greater things out there…and I am here. I am scared of what my goals may bring to me, and I am terrified that I won't ever achieve them. I can't imagine myself as an adult, let alone a professional adult. Me, a teacher? What a thought! Empowering the minds of the neglected generations, telling them of the greatness that the world needs of them, of what it is…what a humbling role! And international development, humanitarianism, philanthropy...the thought is exhaustively huge! I'm not in it to change people or to proselytize, but to act—to love—when the need arises. At that, I keep asking myself if I am missing my opportunities to act. If I died tomorrow, would one person's life have been made better? I have so much work left to do!
Am I too passionate to succeed?
A crisis of survival? Faith? Self? Perspective? Perhaps what I am going through is more of an awakening: no one really likes waking up because sleeping is so much easier—sleeping is the fantasy and the accumulation of random bits of events, knowledge and idea. It is in the waking that the effects of sleep are transformed into action and thereby, meaningful.
