I'm scared of real life.

It keeps coming back at me, lately. I have gotten back into the working-and-going-to-school thing, which was fine for a while, but I'm getting more and more disillusioned by the whole process.

What am I doing in college? I want an education, but I want it for education's sake. Personal growth. As a poor person, I am not entitled to that, I guess. But that's what I want. Part of it, anyway.

I want to do good things in this world. I want to help people. I want to make it a better world for the next people. For the animals, and for the plants so they can eat clear daylight and drink fresh water. My writing has gotten less poetic tonight. It had been getting to a state of being poetic, which is one way to know that I'm feeling depressed. I lose my facade of normal grammar when I am getting depressed and retreat back into the disjointed daydreamer's mind-wandering way of speaking...

But anyway.

How can I do the most good?

I'm realizing more and more that my role in making the world a better place may have to be small. This would be tolerable if it were not also almost certain that it will not be enough. It will never be enough. I am not hopeless, and I don't think there is no chance for humanity to better itself... but I just don't see how the current society can be conducive to any such thing.

Too many isms and ations.

What about the old dreams? What about the things that have consistently helped me to have hope, to stay alive, to kindle my desire to contribute?

I don't think I can be a teacher. Teachers are some of the most wonderful things you can be. But I don't know how hopeful I could feel in that tightly oppressive institutional environment.

I don't think I can be a standup comedian. I don't have the timing and I am terrible at memorizing lines, and also at improvising. I stumble over even the simplest and most well-remembered of jokes, in every situation. But standup comedians are some of the most wonderful people. They bring me hope and laughter, and cynicism and deadpan delivery and exposure of the dark side and the light side and serious commentary and absurdist silliness. Comedy, like education, expands the mind - I would argue that it does so better than any other form of education.

I don't know if I can become a rock star. People always tried to shit on that dream. I don't want to be famous, per se, because it doesn't seem very pleasant anyway and I really hate the stupid fame culture which is made out of bullshit and apathy toward anything of actual importance, which is the opposite of what art is supposed to do. But music is the art that has always pulled apart my heart and I have burned effigies of my dreams. I don't want to be a musician, I want to be a rock star. And the reason is this: I want to reach many people.

But I don't like being on stage. I don't want the pressure on me.

I feel like I'd rather just be the understudy in my own life.

Or just an observer. Like the ones in Fringe, before the writers decided that they were some malignant time-travelling iteration of humanity. I just watch, and see, and learn, and my part in the world is to put together the pieces and build it all into a picture, and maybe someday to share that picture.

But how do I build the picture? How do I build the words to share the picture, especially when it's so incomplete?

I need to find the pieces that warrant their own worlds and string them up in words and phrases.

I need to recapture the strength of emotion that I had as a teenager. I get bits and pieces of it but it's never as strong.

I need to recapture a lot of things.

I'm too full of apathy and empathy. I have few feelings of my own so I borrow those of others. My feelings are weak threads, and I worry that my brain has stopped communicating with some of its most vital parts.

It's all broken record bullshit. I think and write these things over and over but I do nothing. I sit and accumulate student loan debt and drag on the process of failing a class that I need to graduate and just continue to let myself get fucked by life. And in the meantime I fail to be grateful for the things I have most of the time, even though I have a home and internet access and I can usually pay at least most of my bills on time and I've only ever received one shut-off notice and I have a pair of pants that I wear and there's only one hole in them and it's pretty small so that's good.

All of my problems are first-world problems, I guess except for being female, which is problematic all over but shouldn't be. Except I don't even know if I am female.

I really hope I get this job in the Women's Center at school. I need to liberate myself from my current self.

My current self is one of those inconsequential people who does nothing their entire life and works in a convenience store.

I have nothing against those people but there is such an emptiness there, and I think if I find any more emptiness in my life it's going to overflow.