for the past couple of weeks, i’ve been absurdly happy.

this is not a standard thing with me; i’m just not a very perky person. i don’t even like very perky people. i’m used to an emotional state of barely controlled panic combined with a sort of resigned apathy. i’m frequently worried or anxious, but not in a productive way, because it’s not the kind of worry that inspires me to actually do something about whatever it is i’m worried about; i just get upset and then try not to think about it.

when i first left nyu a couple of years ago, i wasn’t too thrilled about it but i felt that it was the best thing i could have done in that situation. i’d just gotten over mono and failed a class for the first time in my life because i couldn’t catch up enough on all the work i’d missed. i felt academically burned out; i’d sit in my dorm room drinking carton upon carton of orange juice and trying not to feel like i’d rather jump off the bridge than register for another year of reading i didn’t have time to do and papers i didn’t know how to write and exams i could never bring myself to study for. i felt like continuing at nyu was a waste of money because i wasn’t going to accomplish anything except drive myself even crazier trying to do something i was no longer equipped to do.

the tricky thing about feelings like that is that when you’re experiencing them, you can’t forsee a time when it will be different. not only did i not think i could continue at school, i didn’t think i would ever be able to continue at school. my parents, knowing me as they do, knew that of course that wasn’t true and that there would come a time when i’d want to go back. they tried to nudge me into, if not staying, at least leaving things in such a way that they would be easier to come back to. they knew as well as i do now that a girl who voluntarily takes classes at harvard during her summer vacations in high school doesn’t just walk away from college because she got sick for a while.

but at the time, i felt like i was done with school forever, and while i tried to play up the fact that i was working in an industry where skills are more important than degrees, it was a thought that depressed me. i had taken school very seriously for a very long time, and i felt like i’d let myself and everyone else down by just abandoning it. i didn’t see that there was anything else i could do, though, so i kept working at my stupid little design job and paying my rent and going to clubs on weekends, and everything was okay for a while.

then i got laid off from my stupid little design job, and was dumped into a job market that is no longer as easygoing as it was when i entered it the first time. companies were no longer scrambling for anyone with “new media” skills; people couldn’t even keep the jobs they had, much less find new ones. so i started to panic. a couple of months after this, i took the train home to massachusetts to attend my brother’s harvard graduation.

this affected me more than i thought it would. harvard was where i had wanted to go since the first time i started hanging around the campus when my mother enrolled in the jfk school of government. i loved everything about it; i took classes there through the school of continuing education’s secondary school program, and when i got to my senior year of high school i went to all the little prospective applicant lunches and tours and interviews, the whole deal. i applied early action, and was disappointed but not crushed when they deferred me to regular admission. but then spring came, and with the thick acceptance packets i got from the schools i never really thought i would go to, there was a slim little envelope from harvard informing me i’d been placed on the waitlist. then, i was crushed. i decided i didn’t even want to stay in the boston area anymore. fuck it, i was moving to new york city. so i did, and i enrolled at nyu, and i had that glorious first semester followed by my disastrous bout of mono. we’ve covered this already.

the point is that when i went back to harvard to see my brother graduate, i was a little bit bitter about school in general and harvard in particular. then i saw him getting his degree, i saw the handful of people becoming doctors of philosophy, i remembered how much i had been looking forward to college in the first place, and i started missing it. i stopped focusing on the one shitty semester i’d had at nyu, and i decided that i wanted to go back. i wanted my own fucking philosophy degree, or whatever. and i realized that my parents had been right, that here i was wanting to go back less than two years after i’d said i’d never do it again.

since then i’ve been doing all the paperwork, having all the meetings, worrying about whether it would all work, about whether now that i finally wanted to come back, i’d be denied the opportunity. but miraculously, it seems like it has all worked out. i started this entry by saying i was happy, remember? and this is why. i no longer have that nagging guilt and depression about not being in school. i’m back. i’m doing it again, and i love it. for the first time in almost two years i feel like i’m doing exactly what i want to be doing, as well as what everyone who cares about me has been telling me i should do.

now i have other worries, of course. i have that reading to do and those papers to write and exams to study for, but i’m excited about it. my classes are forcing me to think in ways i haven’t had to in a long time, and i’m surrounded by all these smart, interesting people in exactly the same situation i’m in - we’re all students. and that is making me really happy.