I caught a whiff something while I was walking back to my room earlier this evening. It reminded me of something I felt when I was in the Philippines, scouring the streets of Manila in the back of a taxi at midnight. The sense of displacement. The feeling that I am hundreds of thousands of miles away from where I should be, whether it be real or a figment of my imagination. The realization that in this world, the world flashing by my eyes, I am not real, and I would never be real. An outsider looking in from a window. A tourist lost in a city without a map and without a place to go. A stranger. A ghost.
At that moment when all of these feelings came fleeting back to me, I understood that I'm still lost. And that in itself is discouraging to the point where I don't know what I'm doing anymore.
Oftentimes in my English classes, I will sit back and watch my classmates analyze stories, poems, and narratives to incredibly ridiculous levels, and I find myself in total awe, thinking "HOW THE HELL DID THEY THINK OF THAT AND WHY AM I HERE" half of the time.
Conversely, in my calculus class, I often find myself wanting to sleep. I blame the fact that my professor dims the lights down so low that it could lull any child to sleep, but even so, the effect is still there. And trust me, I love calculus. I love formulas and finding answers because in some weird, sick way, it makes me feel as if I'm solving my own personal problems through these functions. But as much as I may love calculus, it doesn't match well with my time-keeping habits; when I find that I have a ridiculous amount of homework to complete in only a day, I get to a point where I just want to jump off the nearest building.
What am I doing here? I'm studying English and Biology and I don't know why I'm doing either. I picked up English on a whim because during orientation, I wanted to be a teacher. That still holds true today, but the courses that I take do absolutely nothing for me. Then, I picked up Biology because I find it interesting and I did well in my Biology courses at my community college, even though it drained the life, soul, and happiness out of me.
I came here because I wanted to study linguistics and I wanted to teach kids abroad how to speak English, and in return, I would learn more languages and be able to communicate more effectively to a broad range of people.
So, again, I must ask, what am I doing here?