Perhaps the end comes too soon?

In three months, I'll be parading around with a degree in hand- one of the few in my family to reach this level of education, yet just as deeply in debt. I'll be able to conjugate any Italian verb, describe the five pillars of Islam, and articulate the origin/consequences of the western myth. Those are just the skills I'm perfecting this semester. Add these to my ability to kick out a paper- it seems almost an instant A, probably due more to the standard of writing here than any latent or learned skill on my part. Yet without a particular letter, from any one of the many graduate schools I've applied to, my future becomes precarious. All my illusions of security shall vanish. My presumed skills might be rendered useless, at the very least they'll have to be melded to fit a new occupation. Trying to wrap my mind around the grad school applications was quite a task. Sometimes, I felt paralyzed. Fear held me captive, or so I thought. That idea was later discarded because it was too dramatic. Still, I knew somewhere in my mind that no matter how hard I worked on those applications, it would never be enough to satisfy my inner perfectionist (who speaks in a voice eerily like my mum's at times...). I treated that as an excuse to expend less energy and less thought. Now, I'm deathly afraid it's going to bite me in the ass. If I had issues piecing together pieces of paper and writing prose- tasks I usually find easy- how can I ever hope to renovate my mind and my work ethic?

Discussions such as these, open-ended and hopeless, seem to fill my hours. As much as I want to write about the wonderful and interesting classes I'm taking this semester, my self-doubt claws its way to the forefront of my mind. I can't ignore it. So, I've acknowledged it. In a space neither boldly public or serenely private, I admit that I'm so tripped up with worry that I can't seem to find that optimist that started college three years ago or the confident, albeit new, scholar that launched an ambitious academic plan. However, maybe with this acknowledgment, I'm discovering I still have a smidgen of gumption left.

And that shall be last pathetic self-centered prose I shall write for this semester. Now, it has been outlawed and I shall move on to happier topics, like how Lone Ranger would have been a murderer and how western religions have intolerance built into their belief. Not new topics, but new to me and I'm eager to explore more in later posts.