Second-guessing

I have had a lot the think about following the tragedy at my Alma Mater. My biology department was small; so it was inevitable that I knew everyone who died, the injured, and the shooter herself. I am grief-ridden, and I do not how to mend all that has been broken both inside of me and at my school. Yet, unbelievably, in the face of this immense tragedy, I have learned a value lesson about the futility of second-guessing.

I struggled with anorexia when I attended UAH, so I was not able to make my experience as full as I might have wanted. I did not take a lot of the classes I wanted because my maximum workload capacity was diminished due to overwhelming fatigue from starving. I did not work in one of the biology labs at UAH.

I am so glad I didn't.

Up until Friday's shooting, I have hated myself for decisions I made in school. Now, I see that every decision I made was self-preserving in the long term. I almost worked in a killer's lab. I could have worked in the labs of any one of the people who lost their lives and been even closer to the biology department.

I have also regretted graduating in the winter instead of the spring, as I have found myself in a lull before going to graduate school this fall. I could still be attending UAH, and I could easily have found myself forced to reenter the Shelby Center in the aftermath of what happened there.

The point I am really trying to make is that it never does any good to question whether or not you made the "right decision" in the past. I thought for a while that I had made a lot of bad decisions, but now they all seem right. You just never know.

Happiness

I find that happiness is more fragile than unhappiness. When I am really happy, I do not want to piece it apart. I do not want to fully consider why this particular thing brings me joy, or whether it is replicable. Thinking too hard about happiness generally dampens the feeling, and other people can easily steal it away with just the slightest negative comment.

Yet, when I am miserable, I try to dissect the reasons behind my emotional state. I want to understand what has made me unhappy, and I want to fix it. It is very difficult for anyone else to improve my depressed moods, so other people’s comments fail to affect me. Misery is quite a steadfast emotion for me.

Thinking about all of this has led me to the conclusion that, rightly or not, I consider happiness to be illogical and unhappiness to be sensible. I don’t like to ruminate on my happy moods because I believe that doing so will dispel them. Any negative comments made towards me when I am happy I use as “proof” that I have no logical reason to be in a good mood. I believe also that when I am unhappy, it is because I am discouraging myself from engaging in self-deception. If anyone tries to talk me out of my bad moods, I always think they just don’t “get it.”

When I was really suffering from anorexia, I thought that if I tried to get better, it would be because I was hiding from the “truth.” I did not deserve to eat, I believed, so the right and noble thing to do was to starve. I suspected that other people knew I did not deserve to be healthy, but they would just not admit it to themselves. Thus, I considered myself to be a kind of martyr for the truth—the truth being that I did not deserve life.

I am still stubborn for the truth, but I try not to equate happiness with an unwillingness to be truthful. Until I am able to be strong and confident in my happiness, I will just have to be careful with my fragile joys.

Patience

I am not a patient person. I am not patient because I value control above all else. Being patient means that I am relinquishing control to something or someone else--time, circumstance, graduate schools, etc. Another reason I am not patient is that I think that I have always associated patience with inactivity, which I further equate with laziness. If I am not doing something--anything, the thought usually goes-- then I am not being proactive enough. However, I think that after a month of self-deprecation over not doing anything, I have finally realized that I am doing all I can. I have applied to schools, I have applied to jobs, and now the ball is other people's courts. It is up to other parties to decide if and when to contact me. Chomping at the bit is not going to quicken the process, and frankly, I just need to settle down.