My Idea of Living

Tomorrow is the start of NaNoWriMo and I'm freaking out a little bit internally. Wait. Back up; those two ideas have nothing to do with each other. It is true, it starts tomorrow, but that's not why I'm freaking out internally. I'm freaking out because I have a paper due on Charlotte Perkins Gilman tomorrow at 9 am and I haven't even read everything for it.

OH, by the way, I'm thinking of leaving school after this next spring semester. I'm not giving up, I'm just postponing my education for, let's say, three years or so. In fact, I wrote a post on this the other day over on tumblr, but I'll copy and paste it here for you to read:

School is beatin’ me down, you guys.

I’m not doing well, in other words. I am currently passing 3 of my 6 classes, as far as I know, and I simply have very little motivation to continue onward. I know, I know. “OMG it’s one semester, get over it”. No. It’s school in general. Life, really. This little conservative town that I live in and all the expectations people have of me (or in some cases, lack thereof). I want to teach eventually, this is true, and yes, I have to go to college and such in order to do this. But at the same time…I want to live my life more right now.

One of my roommates is a lot like me, in the sense that we both want to see the world, travel a lot, and basically live life to the fullest. Plus, she has amazing taste in music and movies. Anyway, she’s going to stop going to school next semester because she honestly doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, and I think she just wants to stop and figure it out…meanwhile, she’ll be saving up to travel the world.

This is an intriguing idea. The only thing that has previously stopped me from dropping out* of school is the fact that I would have to start paying my loans back, but I’m really not sure why I’m so afraid of that. I have the time, I’m capable, and I can do it. The thought of not going to school, of just working and saving up money to move to somewhere I’ve always wanted to go to is so tempting.

Another thing is that I’m very close to acquiring just my Associates degree, which isn’t much these days it seems, but it’s better to have that than nothing, especially if I end up needing another job at some point, right?

I mean…I could be looking at this the completely wrong way. I could be throwing away my future. But I really don’t see it as that; truthfully, I want to put my future on hold and focus on the present day.

As human beings, we are bound to make mistakes and bad choices, but we are also able to take those experiences and learn from them. I feel as though I haven’t learned anything from my life in at least two years. I’m doing it all by the book, but I don’t want to be. I want to go to all the places I have never been before, and I want to live my life and make mistakes. I want to do something stupid and make new friends and write postcards home from wherever I happen to be at the time. I want to live in the NOW. Not the in-five-years-from-now.

I’m pretty sure that this next spring semester is going to be the last one for me for a couple of years. I don’t want a plan to live by, I want a life to live.

So. There’s that.

*I hate that the idea of dropping out has such a negative connotation attached to it. I know it’s stupid, but people really do look at you differently when you tell them you’re going to stop going to school.