This song remains the same

I keep going to panel discussions, small meetings of students and deans, and large scale meetings of my community. I dutifully mark the announcement of each one of these events and make a point of attending. I sit, and I listen very carefully to my fellow students or my professors, and sometimes I even squirm a bit uncomfortably but I never ever speak up.

I find it impossible to speak in my classes. I go to every class and do a pretty good job of reading as much of the material assigned as I can. I sit and I listen as hard as I can, but I can never speak. I am overwhelmed with feeling that I don't know what I really think well enough.

I guess I keep waiting for someone else to say what I believe, about anything. Some people come close. I could probably line up snippets of some other peoples' speech and maybe it would resemble what I'm feeling and what I think, but what good is that? Anyway, by and large I feel like no one is getting it quite right, yet I am somehow incapable of perfectly articulating what I feel to be true and right.

I keep deleting paragraphs because I don't think I'm ready yet to write about how I see the world, and how I see what's happening. I wish I could come up with something worthwhile to say, but maybe I just have to wait on it.

Actually, I think the only time I really manage to talk at length about how I feel is in therapy. I talk long and fast and furious about what I really think, I mimic and pretend to argue with people around me, mock them, talk back to them, disagree with them, qualify their statements on their behalf. I contradict myself, go back on things that I've said, because when I act like I'm arguing with other people I'm usually arguing with myself. Sometimes I think my therapist doesn't think this is all that important. I think it is, obviously, but for a few reasons. I think that my chatter in therapy is something that I really don't like to see in other people - it gets on my nerves. I often wish that my discussion classes were more lecture oriented, because I can't stand what my classmates have to say - they often make these prolonged, tangential, convoluted, and ill informed statements that never seem to bring about any meaningful understanding of the topic at hand.

I don't know what I really want to get at, but I know that part of it is that I desperately wish I were more comfortable with screwing up in public. It's only if I'm not so deathly afraid of making mistakes that I'll be able to talk to people and make attempts at articulating my ideas. It's easy to be unafraid in therapy, I can say whatever I want with relatively few consequences. (There are certain things that provoke consequences. I can't say that I'm suicidal without some serious reaction coming from the other side.) Rationally I can tell you that the very high standards I set for myself are probably not a very good idea, but it's not like I can just stop and all of a sudden be able to speak.

2002-11-30, The song remains the same

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