I'm lost

I have less than two weeks left at home. This is probably my last summer spent mostly in my parents house and it was nothing it should have been. If I could make one wish right now it would be to redo this summer I think. My family has only become more strained, as it would be a lie to say it wasn't somewhat strained in the first place. Tensions have run so thin. Screw Atlas, the real weight of the world rests on my mom's shoulders and her back is breaking under the strain. This afternoon I just couldn't take it anymore and all I wanted to do was get in a car and drive, I didnt give a damn where I ended up I just wanted to drive. But no, I walked to the field out back and sat in the sun and breeze instead. I hoped the breeze would clear my head but I'm not sure it helped at all. I just need something to do, someone to talk to, someone to listen, and someone to give me a hug and tell me that life will be okay, that my family will be okay, and that I will be okay.

Summers just haven't been my thing lately I guess. The second half of summer 2005 was a disaster from which I'm still feeling the aftershock and participating in mental disaster relief efforts. And now the events of the past 3 months have pretty much destroyed all the hopes I had for memories of a wonderful family summer.

It never ends.

And I just don't want to worry about a thousand things anymore. Sooner or later, someone is going to break, to snap. And when it happens I hope both that I am on a different planet, and that I'm here to pick up the pieces. But at the moment I'm not quite sure the pieces will be big enough to fit back together.

I think I'm terrified that the ending to this saga may very well involve a tragedy of Shakespearian magnitude. My mom wants me to leave. To go to Cincinnati so that I am no longer involved on a daily basis. But I don't want to go back. Very little of me wants to back at all, much less before I absolutely have to. All I want is to be HOME. But the place I've been all summer hardly resembles it. No one in my family got a summer vacation this year. And I no longer know what to do. I want to experience the abudant happiness confidence I both enjoyed and faked all through high school. But I don't know how to find it. It's no longer on my radar screen nor are even the means to the end. I feel overwhelmed with everything. Except that 'everything' implies that good things are included but they are conspicuously lacking.

I'm not even excited for school to start. I still dread facing the practice rooms. I dread that feeling of wondering whether I'm in the right place and whether I've made the right decisions in the past because they don't feel right at the moment. I dread the feeling that I had a lot more things going for me in high school than I do in college and more than that, I dread the realization that I'm the oddball. I know life isn't fair, and I never took it for granted in high school, but now if I try to talk about the things that disappoint me, I have no one who will listen much less understand, because suddenly it's my fault I had it so good once.

"suck it up- you can deal now, because you got all the opportunities before," "what will being dissatisfied do for you? not everyone was so lucky," "it's your own fault that you see things this way now, not everyone else's and not the school's. your outlook is determined by your past. feel guilty." All things I've been told, more or less, in the past year. The only person who understood a little of my disappointment was Joel. Joel, who actually seized it as an opportunity and DID something about it. And now he's gone. I tell myself I didn't act because I'm not a quitter. But really it's because I'm scared. I'm scared of doing the wrong thing. Better the evil you know than the evil you don't, right?

I guess it's good that I won't be starting off the year with false hopes and delusions of grandeur. This time, the schoolyear can only suprise me in a good way. There's a lot of dues paying to be done in Cincinnati and I can only hope that I got most of mine out of the way last year. I know it will never be what I thought it would be this time a year ago, but I'm willing to be proved wrong. In fact I challenge this year to do just that. I'm goign to throw myself into doing the maximum at everything. I need to DO something to keep from this slump.

Like Loren said, it's so hard when you have nothing to do, to motivate yourself to work for something in the distance. Practice, find a job, clean... it's all the same and it feels good to know I'm not the only one in that particular predicament. But in the meantime, my family struggle along with the emotional and mental toll that this summer has exacted each and every painful moment has worn down my desire to work and fight for anything. I feel lost and all I want is to be swept up in a hug and never let go.

Now as I sit here it feels good to have written all this but at the same time I know that I haven't written any of the things I most want to write; I just don't know how to start. or how to say the things I mean and feel and have felt for so many weeks.
Who knew this summer would be like this. I'm ready for winter. The beautiful weather and flowers does not match what I feel inside and only makes it worse.

I wish it would rain.