meaning

I want to live a full and meaningful life. I want it so badly that every moment I'm not doing something meaningful, I'm waging a silent verbal battle against myself for being lazy, incompetent, and unmotivated. Each morning, I wake up and lay in bed thinking about what the day holds. I dread getting up because I know that, as soon as I do, I am fully responsible for how my day turns out. When I finally do get up, I am angry with myself for sleeping in too long. I worry that I won't get the things done I obligated myself to complete. Whether I get everything done or not, I feel like I should have done more.

A girl in my small group told me my problem sounds like the plight of the intellectual, meaning that I'm so driven to pursue intellectually stimulating activities that I can't allow myself to sit still. It's a hidden compliment, but it doesn't really resolve the problem. The fact is that I have always been disappointed in myself; being in school doesn't change that; being out of it certainly hasn't. To live a full and meaningful life I need to start seeing the beauty of spare time, moments of inactivity, and thinking in bed. Don't they contribute to a well-lived life?

I am often rather nostalgic about my freshman and sophomore years of college. I've let go of the romance for the most part because it is not useful to dwell on a hazy and exaggerated narrative of the past. But I do think I was in a stage in my life where I naturally accepted the beauty of just sitting on grass or talking to a friend or writing a poem about what I had for lunch. As I've grown more self-aware, I've turned inward to the point that seeing sun-dappled leaves out of my window can't overshadow the nagging feeling that I'm not good enough.

It does make my heart a little warmer to be able to contribute something higher than fashion to the blogging world as of late. This blog will always be more meaningful to me than someone's water lily. To be honest, I'm about to give up on making the other blog popular or monetarily successful.