The Second Decade

My twentieth birthday felt very quiet.  It could be that I was just very sleepy from the midnight train home.  We had a nice dinner, and my mom gave me some socks--not wrapped, just in a Target bag.  I liked them.  Special Unit 2 is back on TV, on Sci-Fi now, which is happy. 

Ah, who am I kidding?  It's Spring Break, and I am enormously stressed out.  I destroy everything I touch.  There's an enormous gouge in one of the lenses of my glasses, which my parents will go ballistic over if they see.  I plan on wearing contacts all week.  I forgot my contact solution at school.  I got a stain on my beautiful new pants, so I sneaked down into the laundry room a few minutes ago to desperately try to remove it--before my parents see.  The U  key on my keyboard has something wrong with it.  I'm afraid there's something stuck under it.  I should ask my dad to help me clean it, but he will get angry at me for not taking better care of my good computer.

I do not deserve to be given nice things.  I am a disaster at life.

I'm scared to think of what I'll ruin next.  Automatically, I want to be back in Spokane.  Here, I'm ridiculously on edge.  It reminds me of elementary school and middle school, days when I would walk home from the bus stop just full of dread, trying to remember if I had made my bed, put my clothes away, cleaned up after breakfast, hoping that my grandma wouldn't yell at me when I walked in for things I had forgotten to do.  I'm scared that I can't live up to expectations.  I'm scared that I'm not an adult.  I hate that I'm this anxious and this guilty about so many small things.  What's wrong with me, anyway?

At dinner, my dad renewed his concern that I am not going into medicine, law, or science, or something that would challenge me.  Economics is a soft option.  And I have some trouble with it--I don't always get the concepts as quickly as I do in other subjects.  So I'm stupid, lazy, and wasteful of my potential, because I wasn't brave enough or good enough to want to do premed when I started college.  I feel like crap.  I hate this.  I mean, I could never really consider killing myself, please don't read too much into it, but sometimes I honestly just don't feel much like living. 

And there's something wrong with that, I realize.  Somehow, I'm just about unable to feel passionate about things at all, because somewhere in my head I'm waiting for my dad's voice to tell me that I'm wrong about it. 

Well, except for my anti-SUV sentiment.  And tree-hugging.  And the people I love best, and my friends.  Those are all safe, twisted into the helixes of my most core being.  Anything else--writing, economics, fantasy novels, Teach for America, professorship, living arrangements, past decisions, study habits, life goals, how I spend my time from minute to minute--all are nerve-ending bare to criticism.  I never know that I'm right.  I can never just feel that I'm right.  And I can't let myself be wrong.

Deep-down, I have a terrible envy for religion.  I want to know that kind of surety.