This weeks poem “I had a Plan” is all about the future. When I was in high school, I had the rest of my life planned. I knew everything I wanted and exactly how I was going to get there. Looking back now that was pretty stupid of me to do. I am not saying that having a plan is bad, but assuming that your plan will go perfectly is idealistic at best. That is exactly what happened to me. I came here to Penn State and things changed. I still have some of the same goals. I want a PhD and I would like to be a professor (although I went from wanting to be a research professor to wanting to be a teaching professor), but many things have changed. My priorities and views on the world have evolved. To be completely honest though, this poem is not finished. It leaves off when everything has fallen apart, but it never mentions the rebuilding or any of what comes after the realization that the dream life you had is not what is actually going to happen. It lacks any part about coming to accept that and what that acceptance involves. I hope to eventually finish this poem, but as I discussed last week, I am currently struggling to write.

With an incomplete and rather short poem like this week’s, I normally like to take the actual commentary in another direction away from the specifics of the poem. I have discussed this before, but I am not the best at sharing my emotions in real life. A computer screen gives me the level of separation I need to open up. I have already told you that this poem is based on my experiences, but I wanted to tell you more about how it felt and how I have responded in the hope that if you know someone or are going through it yourself that you will be able to relate and realize that this is a part of life. Coming into college I was very fortunate to have my life fairly together externally (if you have read past post you know that inside may not have been as great). To be fair, my life is still very much together, but due to the circumstances of the past year, the internal stuff has begun to bleed out. There are days where I feel as if life goes on around me, separate and independent of my actions. It is as if I am nothing more than a spectator in my own life. I feel out of control and numb to it all. There are days where I forget to eat until late at night because I am just trying to keep track of what I am doing at that exact moment. It is kind of surreal and it does not happen every day (thank goodness), but it happens enough to remember. Those days are my plan falling apart days. I am no longer one hundred percent in control of myself and as terrifying as that is I am trying to come to terms with that. I can not control the world and unfortunately (or fortunately depending on who you ask) the world does have an influence on me. I guess that is just part of life.