respite

I am exhausted. The past 24 hours or so were wonderful, but active; unproductive, but relaxing. I kept on having to remind myself that today was a Tuesday. My roommate said it well, I thought: "I feel like I've been through a long weekend." I will get back on track tomorrow, but perhaps I needed these past 24 hours (and, in fact, the 72 before them) to help me deal with some recent events.

I won't get into the whole story of why I didn't go to DC here, but the end of the story is that I changed my plane ticket so that I could go home for a week in early June (June 2-8 now, actually, not 2-9 like I said before), which is something I'd been hoping to do anyway. I didn't even lose any money on the flight, because Southwest doesn't make you pay a change fee--just the difference in price.

I spent much of the day today roaming around campus and U with my roommate. We had destinations, but weren't in a hurry, so we enjoyed the day, stopping to play catch, stopping to talk, sometimes just stopping to enjoy the view. This was all a follow-up to a house party I went to last night, which is sort of like going to the bars, but you're drinking in a house and a yard rather than in a bar.

Over these past five days or so, as I've been processing the recent events I mentioned above, I have realized that I have a tendency, in certain situations, to see people for who I want them to be, and not necessarily for who they are. I had thought that my intuitions about people were pretty reliable--in other words, that the initial intuitions I have about someone usually match up with who they turn out to be, after I've known them for a while--but this isn't true. My intuition is sometimes clouded by what I want to see and it's sometimes clouded because people don't always act genuinely. Of course, sometimes my intuition is correct, but the point, I think, is that you don't fully know someone until you've spent quite a bit of time with him/her; until you've seen that person in different situations, dealing with a variety of issues; until you get to know that person's story.

I have also taken a firmer stand on the fact that I don't need people in my life who make me feel small, judged, patronized, stupid, and so forth, for being who I am. The fact is that I have a number of dear friends, from the various stages of my life, who have shown me what real friendship is. I hope that, occasionally, I have been able to show it back to them. These are people who clearly love me--even if they never say it, their actions reveal it. I don't think I can expend energy on people who make me feel unloved when I have plenty of people who make me feel loved. This is not to say, of course, that I'm looking for adoration or that I only consider people my friends who think that everything I do is beyond criticism--on the contrary, a friend is a great critic, because s/he sometimes sees things about you that you can't see about yourself. However, the friend can critique because the critique is always rooted in love--the friend wants the best for you, because the friend loves you.

In the past weeks, months, I have disappointed some people, and some people have disappointed me. I have become acutely aware of how relationships can change, and I have learned to be more honest with myself, both about other people and about my own values. Because of this honesty, my life has gained a direction, a focus, that it didn't have before. I'm still not entirely sure how the focus will be realized, in terms of a job once I get done with my PhD, but I have my passions in sight, I have a dissertation topic in mind, and I have a much stronger sense of who I am now than I did in January.

The summer stretches ahead.