Catching Up

Hey there, Interwebers!

So it's been a while, huh? At the request of my friend, I'm going to start blogging again.

Let's see how this goes.

Where to begin? I guess I can pick up where I left off, which was my feelings of isolation. Well, they haven't really gone away. Sometimes, it feels like I'm not part of YWiC at all. When Daniella assigned our rolls at the beginning of the semester (before she left), she put me on all the workshops and after school groups that weren't directly YWiC-related. So I was working the Teen Tech workshops at the downtown mall, mentoring for Supercomputing, and working the CS4HS workshops. I worked one of the middle school workshops when Elena and Angela had to leave for a conference, but I still didn't feel connected. It didn't help that I didn't spend much time in the office. I was in there maybe two hours a week because I only had one class in Science Hall, didn't feel comfortable being in an enclosed space with at least three other YWiC members at a time, and I liked working in my dorm as opposed to the office. At least there I had a desk.

So yeah. I didn't mesh with the other girls. I didn't feel like a part of YWiC. It was even worse when I was left alone with a group of students. With Teen Tech, so few showed up that it was usually just Becca, me, and one other person. Marissa was also a mentor for a Supercomputing team but she didn't show up for meetings and she had no idea what her team was doing. Meanwhile, I have three teams I've managed, four if you count one group who only shows up for the important meetings, and all of them submitted their Interim Reports. Three teams! And she wanted to ask Becca if she could stop being a mentor because it was "too much!"

I guess she has valid points. She is a senior and she's working on her senior project. But she didn't even try to monitor her team. She just expected me to handle them. At least Sasha started helping me run the meetings. I don't like being all by myself because I'm terrified that I'm going to fuck something up. Sasha helped me just by being there.

What else has happened? Well, I met a queer girl in my English class, she added me on Facebook, and we talked for a little bit before I made things awkward. I tried to join clubs but I had little motivation to do things besides homework and reading. I went through a spell of depression that hasn't fully gone away, but I'm working on it. I'm trying to keep myself from falling into a rut, but it's hard when I'm questioning my entire life.

What exactly am I questioning? A lot of stuff. Namely, what I'm doing with my life. This semester, the class I enjoyed the most was my English class. I loved the writing assignments, and I had one of the highest grades. After that was sociology. Intro to Data Structures was probably my least favorite class. I didn't hate it, but nothing seemed to click. I struggled so much in that class. Java has never been my strong suit, but because I was surrounded by people who seemed to get it, I felt like a failure. Especially because Ari understood it so easily. (I would like to point out, though, that I scored only four points less than them on the final exam and I was loopy on antibiotics and cold medicine at the time.) I had a bad case of Imposter Syndrome, and it hasn't left me. I keep questioning what I really want to do with my life. I love programming and doing cool stuff with technology, but writing has always been a passion of mine. And then there's sociology! I just don't know what to do. Everyone in my life has expectations of me that I'm not sure I'll ever meet. My mom was talking to Ari about computer science, and she was worried about how I would do in the field. I don't think she thinks I can do it. She's not worried about Ari, apparently. She even told Ari that to their face. But whatever.

I guess I'm just going through what a lot of college students do; I'm figuring out who I am and what I want to dedicate my life to. It's hard. Sometimes I feel like I'm drowning in expectations and most days I can't break the surface to breathe. I'm pulled under a wave of anxiety, the feeling filling my chest and clutching at my lungs. Nothing has ever been so terrifying to me. This is the first time in my life that I can captain my own ship, and I can't help but worry that I'm going to end up shipwrecked somewhere.

I want to make people proud, but I don't know how to do that. Ari is soaring and I barely feel like I can fly. I'm just worried that I won't be able to succeed at life. People tell me not to worry about it, and that I'll find out what I want to do later, but I don't do well without a plan.

God, I feel like I did when I first realized I like girls. I've spent years telling myself one thing only to find myself questioning it. I convinced myself that I would become a computer scientist, but suddenly I'm not so sure. And this can either turn out like my coming out, where I decide that I don't want to do anything in computer science, or I could decide that I just want to minor in computer science. I know that I'll always have something attached to computer science, because my interests include more than just coding.

Well that was a lot of angst. I guess that's it for now. I'll post soon about how my holigays went!
(No, that wasn't a typo)

So long for now!