New.

For me, the start of the school year always comes with the "start" of so many other things. The "start" of new relationships, new friends, new professors, new styles in clothing, new tastes in music...just a whole lot of new. Honestly, more often than not, all of that new overwhelms me to the point where I'm not sure what to do with all the stuff that floats around inside my head.

Lately it seems like even though schoolwork and my senior thesis should be the only things floating around inside my head, they're the last things on my mind. I find myself thinking about the future a lot, like an unnatural amount, and I can't really decide if it's because I'm excited to be done with school or just unbelievably freaked out about the prospects of...life. The future is a whole new level of "new."

I have very little idea of what I want to do with my life; the only thing I do know is that I want to write. I want to write a lot. I want to be able to take all those thoughts scrambled inside my head and put them down on a piece of paper or on a computer screen and turn them into something meaningful. Or I want to turn all the experiences I've had in life - good and bad - and turn them into something meaningful, as a sort of catharsis if you will.

I've been told - by more than one person - that when I try to write things anonymously, I'm not really very good at it. That's probably because I was more or less raised to be a very passive aggressive person. Okay, well I wasn't raised that way per se, not in the sense that my mom would sit me down and tell me never to say how I feel or to go around spraying air freshener around my dorm instead of telling my freshman roommate that she had a scent issue (no worries, it was a mutual hatred and she will never read this), it was just something I picked up on a long time ago that I can't seem to let go of. Because really, how do you let go of taking the easy way out of a difficult situation?

I'm sorry, this post is going off on a huge tangent...or so it would seem. I guess what I'm trying to say is that even though I should be thinking about how I'm going to get through this semester in one piece, instead I'm thinking about what I'm going to do with my life afterwards (and how long it'll be before I'm badgered about it to no end), and if I do end up spending my life in writing, how to go about doing it without being "passive aggressive" and offending people left and right.

I have so many things I can write about, but not a whole lot I can talk about, if that makes sense. Because talking about it would make it so real, so raw, and there are people out there who wouldn't understand. Writing is the easy way out of a difficult situation, in that it helps me sort through my head but it still doesn't really ever get out of my head. Ugh.

If only my thesis were this easy to write. If only it were jumbled around inside my head and I could just sit at a computer and type out 25 pages in like two hours. Wouldn't that be nice...

It's late. I should be sleeping.

I should be doing a lot of things.

~Erin