I don't like school anymore. I hate the smells. I hate the way I feel being here, like a hollowed-out version of myself. I resent the twenty-year-old dudes who want to sit down for a little chit-chat as if I have nothing better to do. I hate the concrete walls - so uninspired. I hate the harsh lighting - how it shows every line. I hate hiding out in an empty classroom and I hate the library when its hushed and full of bodies and my synapses start to fizzle and crack at the lulls. My lower back aches from sitting in uncomfortable chairs for hours on end. I’m disenchanted by it all. I have anxiety walking in familiar halls seeing familiar faces who look right through me, like I'm a ghost. Like I’m nothing at all. I put my earbuds in and play a Tracy Chapman song and I try to remember who I am as I slip my invisibility cloak on.
I just want for this shit to be over. I have no passion for it. I'm bored of the prepackaged classes, and I really don't even care about criminology anymore. I’m tired of listening to my fellow students stutter nervously in monotone voices while giving uninspired PowerPoint presentations with information ripped directly from Google.
How do you reduce crime? It’s not hard, idiots. Give people what they need. Reduce poverty. Allow men to embody softness. Minimize the pain and isolation people experience. Support mental health. Offer free post-secondary education. Support parents in giving their kids childhoods they don’t have to heal from. Form better governments. Question inequality. Abolish capitalism…. need I go on? Why have I been sitting in classes for the better part of 12 years debating this? It’s like a constant loop where we talk about what the problems are, yet do nothing to fix them. Instead, they just get worse. But sure, I’ll integrate this information. These kids aren’t like me – they aren’t going to remember some obscure theory they heard in a third-year class 10 years from now. Meanwhile, here I am quoting the work of dead guys who developed a theory from studying some phenomena in this great dystopia before it went even further in the shitter. Why bother? Haven’t you heard? The system is working exactly as designed. If we truly cared about letting people self-actualize – as described by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (there’s one of the dead guys I was talking about) – we would give people tools to change things for themselves.
With an A+ average, I should be in grad school by now, you know. I should be doing different things with my life. I could be teaching socialist feminism to eager comrades or writing a brilliant screenplay with nuanced depictions of the human condition. I could be subverting the status quo in some other way. I’m done in April, and I’m not even intrigued by the prospects of a new career. An esteemed criminology degree? A lot of good it’ll do me. I’m not trying to be a cop. Have you seen me run? Have you seen how soft I am? I ain’t catching bad guys, I’m trying to understand them.
I had a great career before – a union, government-contract job. It was good to me. But you can’t sit with people’s pain like that forever. It wears on you as they return to the same conditions. It’s as if you never sat through the depths with them, and you begin to feel like you did absolutely nothing to ease their suffering. Now I’m starting over and I’ll probably have a 22-year-old boss and I’ll have to pretend that I don’t know as much as them so as not to be insubordinate or cause any trouble. And I’ll have to act eager and look fresh-faced and not question the working conditions or the resist the long hours. I’ll volunteer my time and be a good team player. What kind of job do I want? It doesn’t matter anyway; it’s never been difficult for me to kill it at an interview. I’m a charmer and I’m smart as hell. I’ve never been drawn to careers for the income they’d bring. A reflection of the privilege I hold, probably. I just want something that ignites a passion, something that has meaning. Story of my life. But now I’m feeling tired and I wish I had done this all earlier in life. I did everything so slowly because I don’t like having to hustle for my worth. I chose a career over continuing with the constant perfectionism I chased while in school. I chose to raise babies and to fight for justice for my brother.
At present, academia seems futile. I don’t find learning hard. I was reading books about the Russian Revolution when I was 10, for goodness sake. I just find that we don’t utilize the knowledge in any meaningful way. Like what are exams for? They’re just memory evaluators, really. If you score high, you look good on paper. Nobody can trust that you’re smart if you don’t show it. There’s a reason to be skeptical – people can be very vapid and dumb. Many of us are lacking in soft skills – empathy, critical thinking, collaborative approaches, an inability to peel back the layers to unearth nuance. Today’s ‘well of knowledge’ is found on TikTok. And all you need to do these days is be an exceptional Googler – not remember that bomb ass scholarly article you looked up in 2014.
None of this really matters. That’s why I just want to do what moves me. I want to live in a resurrected chest that buzzes and ticks. I want to live outside of boxes and lines and let my mind be buoyant and unbridled. I want to read books for sheer enjoyment, and to learn just for the sake of learning. I want to show my children there is so much more beyond what we claim to know.
And yet, at present? I just want to scream. Instead, I head to the bathroom and sink down onto the toilet and hold back stifled tears and my face gets hot and my chest constricts, and I feel like I should stop looking for meaning in anything because we’re all just going through the motions, aren’t we? That’s all this is? I try to remember that beyond this tormented consciousness, beyond this broken fuselage, I’m merely a floating iridescent orb existing in this place for a very short time.
Just a little bit more time.
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