Things have been deteriorating a bit this week. The homework fatigue I've been struggling with all my high school career has returned. So has the fuzziness that comes with my ADHD and low mood. I've been exhausted and out of focus for a week now. Some of my teachers insist on assigning ridiculous amounts of homework without actually teaching anything, which definitely doesn't help me.
The weather has really been ignoring me lately. I absolutely despise the snow. Winter in general has no appeal to me because of my seasonal depression. I think Minnesota has been through an identity crisis lately. The snow comes and goes every ten minutes, and when it comes, it comes like a January blizzard. It seems like something's unable to let winter go. Every time I look out of my window, I see another death rattle of the last season.
Speaking of my window, I've been enjoying the little things as much as I can. I have a lovely desk right in front of an extremely big second story window. I watch the sunset through it every night as I do my homework. The other day, a thought struck me that went something like this: millenniums of work went into securing me this spot on a spinny chair at a desk in front of a window. Only a generation ago, my father couldn't afford shoes. Two generations ago, my mother's father watched his father die of starvation during the famine. My father crawled his way out of a one-room dirt hut in a mountain village in China that was so small it didn't have a name. I live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood in a nice town in a first-world country. I am the product of lifetimes of hard work. Thousands of years of progress and suffering of my ancestors brought me to this point.
I've also been having other strange thoughts. My intrusive thoughts have been on my mind a lot lately, especially the grand and sweeping realizations. The first one was in November, at an FMAYS concert with the FMSO. Essentially, I was a high school student in the highest group of my age range in this city, playing at a joint concert with adults of the highest group of their age range. It felt like I was one of them. It was an incredible experience, and during it I had this thought: this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. It was such a striking and undeniable truth that after the concert was over, I was almost crying. That was my life's purpose.
I was at a friend's house in December when I had another one of those thoughts. He was hosting a party, and I was silent for a moment, just watching everyone and especially him. Then I thought: so THIS is why people get married. That was one of my more dramatic intrusive thoughts, but I understood why people commit their entire lifetimes to a single person, so they can have their little house in the suburbs and host parties with their friends--it's really that simple. It wasn't a romantic thought about him, just a realization about life.
I need another realization. I'm getting really tired and really bored. I need to experience something that reminds my brain to keep going instead of being stagnant and procrastinating and scraping by. I think I'll have one when the quarantine is over, but when it ends I'll also have to return to my high-stress life. I'm not sure I'll be ready for that any time soon, but I also don't know how long I can continue isolating myself as an extrovert.
I guess life now has become living day by day. Luckily for me, my newly-found organizational skills haven't fully deteriorated yet. Let's see how they hold up come next week.