The two or three weeks of relative pain I spent following my break up eventually turned into something altogether different. After relentlessly trying to fill the space Jim occupied in my daily life with school work, socializing, and travelling, I realized I’d perhaps distracted myself too much, to the point where I feel a bit of motion-sickness.
Exams were in mid February, and I spent the entire first half of the month trying to focus on studying and occasionally seeing my father who was staying in a hotel not far from where I live. With the former I felt frustrated, or blocked. It’s not only that the material was unbearably dull and unrewarding, but it’s also that I felt very insecure about my abilities after spending so much time with such an over-achieving set of classmates. Pre-dominantly Oxbridge, arrogant, and just as fiercely competitive as I am, I felt like I was surrounded be people that were so much more engaged in their careers than I was. Law for me was a random choice stemming out of indecision, and with a little hard work and a lot of luck I ended up on the team of trainees for the world’s biggest law firm. For my classmates I feel like they’re on a deliberate and endlessly thought-out path. Three years ago I didn’t even know what a solicitor was. And now as this un-engaging work is being thrown at me, I feel like they’re much better equipped to handle donkey work than I am.
Emotionally things have been equally difficult, and it’s not just my break up I’m talking about. My schedule has filled up to the point where I have little time to relax at home and read a book, I feel like I’m constantly running and rushing (from school to lunch to shrink to coffee to dry cleaner) and perhaps I subconsciously made my life so just so I could not think about the fact that I’m worried about my career and performance at school, or the fact that there’s this huge gap were Jim used to be. I started dating people and trying get back into having a little fun, but after my date leaves or after going out with a few friends I feel more alone than I did before. I feel like I’m on a steep learning curve, with a promise of some sort of maturity and complacency at the end of the line; the line being curved, I just can’t see it yet.
On the plus side I feel an amazing rush of independence and my aggressive schedule has allowed me to meet interesting people in different settings. Building strong friendships in London is a difficult task, but one that I know I will succeed in. It once amazed me how I had 200+ contacts on my phone but not one I could call when I felt down or wanted to talk. Yes, there’s a lot of crap to sort through but good people are everywhere, and you need to be able to spot them and put the right amount of effort into building a relationship.
I’m typing this from a rainy and cold Vienna, and I just got off the phone with a dear and close person. As he prepares for his grandmother’s funeral, I feel that perhaps we are all more emotionally connected as a species than we think. It’s not a matter of synchronicity or coincidence, but perhaps a channel of energy, ‘Light’, what have you, that puts our souls in their primordial state – united.
No comments:
Post a Comment