Katherine

I’m in a state of total confusion right now. I want to run away from here, and I want to stay in my dorm room forever. I think I know exactly who I am and what I want one moment, and I realize I’m nobody the next. I go from feeling strong and funny and confident to feeling fat and ugly and stupid. And then I’ll think it’s stupid to feel that way and feel even worse.

It’s as if little cartoon birds have been circling my head all week. It started on Tuesday. I spent the day playing my flute and reading. I didn’t have any classes that day. I felt awesome! Until I got a text from a girl in my advanced French class saying she hadn’t seen me that day and asking if I had dropped the course. It turns out I had misread my schedule and missed three classes that day, one of which had a no-miss policy. I freaked out. I started throwing everything in my vicinity at the wall and crying. I’m not that kind of student, this isn’t me, I kept on telling myself. It was an overreaction, but I think I needed to freak in order to realize that I could handle the situation by just emailing my teachers and asking kids in my classes what I had missed.

I spent Wednesday doing all of the homework and reading I was supposed to have done by Tuesday. Thursday, I went to the classes I had missed. I had to choose and share my idea for a class presentation in French that I totally bs’ed. It was so bad, you guys. I ended up proposing to do one on ballet. That’s so fucking stupid! I could have done Rimbaud’s poems or Le Petit Prince or any of the one million artists or writers I studied in French last year. But I chose ballet. I might as well have chosen cheese or wine. In the class after that, I got my ass handed to me for not knowing who Proust is, which made me feel even worse and even more stupid. It feels like everyone in that class has read every novel by Dostoyevsky and is well-versed in philosophy. It’s mostly juniors and seniors, but being behind still makes me feel like shit.

Friday came, and nothing got any better. I was late to a flute lesson because I got locked out of a building. Because I was late for the lesson, my teacher held me up, making me late for my next class. Did I mention that the lesson wasn’t even on campus? So I had to run back to campus and then to my building in the motherfucking rain. In a see-through blouse. The cherry on top of all this was walking into my class mid-discussion and knocking every marker and eraser out of the whiteboard tray with my backpack while walking to my desk. Everyone was silent until I sat down. That class, I turned in a subpar poetry explication where I completely misunderstood the last part of the poem “First Snow” by Mary Oliver, because I’m an incapable idiot.

Were I in a familiar place, I would have found some of this stuff funny. Instead, it makes me cringe. Friday night, I bought fast food and red nail polish as gifts to myself for getting through a shitty week. I went back to my dorm and watched episode after episode of Battlestar Galactica and A Bit of Fry & Laurie as therapy.

I feel like such a bitch for complaining this much. I feel like everything should be peachy keen right now. Tons of people don’t ever get to go to college. I’m going to a fancy private one. I’m so lucky! But I feel confused and lonely and unsure of myself. I need peace of mind. I need familiar faces. I even wished I were back in high school the other day. Ew! Is there a cure for my confusion and stupidity? More important, does anyone want to give me a hug and a slap in the face? ♦