half rant, half journal entry.  a little incoherent and redundant.
mostly a thank-you note.

i can’t find the post; i wish i had liked or reblogged it.  however i wanted to say thank you for helping me begin to free myself from a form of oppression that i didn’t even know that i was suffering from.  it came up during my finals week last week, i believe, and i’ve been thinking about it ever since.  i’ve always been obsessed with my grades, and am certainly an over-achiever in some senses, but i am terrible with deadlines because my sleep schedule is awful and messes everything up and i have a hard time focusing on doing papers and things - so i am constantly beating myself up for not performing perfectly.  this finals week was especially bad, and i’m still not done with the make-up work i have to do and i’ve been so upset over it that i can barely sleep or eat.  i feel inadequate, so much so that i’ve had spells of anxiety where i am convinced that i may have screwed up the entirety of the rest of my life.  however, placed into the context that i am really only obsessed with working so hard because i am subconsciously hypnotized into thinking that i have to be a well-oiled cog in the machine, i am beginning to breathe more easily about not fitting in to the system as i am told that i must.  in fact, i am beginning to form a sense of pride about it.  what i really want to end up doing is working for a non-profit/NGO/maybe teaching or something, and i’m realizing that i don’t have to have absolutely stellar marks to do this and i don’t have to freak out when i don’t live up to the standards academia (and the rest of society) holds me to.  i don’t aspire to make money, i aspire to make change, and i am seeing more and more that i will not achieve my true aspirations if i continue to strive toward the guidelines that have been set for me by this society.  in fact, if i continue to put the focus on myself, my grades, my success - i will be doing the complete opposite of that.  this isn’t to say that i don’t feel like i need to be educated in order to make change; in fact, i feel the complete opposite, but education comes in many forms that state-standard compulsory/collegiate education and/or job placement will not provide.  i mean to be educated in compassion, empathy, other-directedness, effective means of communication, acceptance, progress, empowerment, coexistence, the search for real truth and the discovery of real knowledge and more, while at the same time maintaining the power of the individual to do and be these things that the world is telling me that i can’t or shouldn’t do or be… which i certainly won’t get from these more “traditional” means.

tl;dr:  if nothing else, in my failure to conform to the standards set out for me by this society, i am finding a sense of pride in the fact that i am an example that the system that we are a part of - capitalism, consumerism, individualism, etc. - is not reflective of the nature of many human beings, if not the human species overall.  i am discovering that i am not broken, deficient, defective, or inadequate.  academia is.  the 9-5 job market is.  the culture of “success” is.  capitalism is. 

so, whoever you are, across the tumblrsphere, i thank you from the bottom of my heart.  i will never forget it.