steph's blog

the interesting thing about studying abnormal psychology at this particular junction in my life is that i'm constantly relating what i read to what i've experienced. and that makes me miss vermont. an awful lot. especially right now.

this is intense.

right now the leaves are turning different shades of red and gold in vermont, and it's still 90 degrees and humid as ever here. is it time to talk about going back yet?

it's a hard decision to make because i missed so much this summer while i was away. i came back and my friends had dated people, broken up with people, undergone major life changes, taken jobs, planned for the future... and a dial-up connection and lack of time to talk meant that i missed most of it and still haven't completely caught up. but all of that is going to happen anyway when i go to grad school. it's depressing to me that i'll be facing very shortly the harsh reality of life by myself, but it's something i probably need to start dealing with soon, if not now.

i really, truly expected my senior year of college to be my best year yet, that living with my best friends would bring us closer, that i could be closer to God and closer to myself. instead, the current trend i've seen, with few exceptions, is me feeling disconnected from everything, and worse, living with the knowledge that it's pretty much all self-imposed. such as the fact that right now, my two roommates are out in the living room talking, and yet once again, i'm trapped here in my room with the doors open, perfectly able to go in there and be sociable but somewhere, unconsciously unwilling to do so. more and more often i'm finding myself uninvited, unexpected - and unhappy that these things are happening.

i've been taking some steps to combat this. i quit my job at Gregory for a number of reasons that i don't particularly want to go into here, and that in itself has helped immensely already. in its place, i may be working on mondays only as a preschool aide for a child with high-functioning autism, which is really an exciting thing for me.

when i was starting off in college, i was attracted immediately to the non-demoninational, the evangelical - basically, the new and different religions from those which i had been exposed to as a child. another interesting advent of this year is that i find myself increasingly repelled by these kind of churches and driven more towards the traditional - perhaps not Catholic, but not the contemporary either. i'm starting to find more beauty in the tradition, in the sacred, in the art and the architexture and the simplicity, than in the plasma TV's, the starbucks and the high-tech modern-day messages. i don't know. it's simply interesting how these things turn around sometimes. maybe i'm tired of going to church by myself, of finding myself exposed and alone at times when i'm supposed to feel covered in God and in a crowd.

i could write and write and write because my heart is really, really full tonight, but i have my first test of the semester tomorrow, so i'd best be off.

"but for now, let me say...without hope or agenda...to me, you are perfect" -love actually