I hate limbo.
This was a realization I had while stuck in the Narita airport for five days, trying to get back to some form of US soil. It was a time of being stuck between a fantastic time in Japan and an open future, with nothing to do but eat Subway and analyze passenger priorities. Five days of Subway sandwiches really puts the brakes on your desires to eat there again. Limbo is a trap between a past you have acknowledged and a future you can’t access.
I’ve been in limbo pretty much since I graduated. The year in China didn’t present itself that way, but I can’t deny that it was a state of existence that kept me confined between my life before and my life after. That year changed my life in many ways, both physically and emotionally, but it was undeniably a year of limbo.
I say this because I feel my brain’s status now as roughly the same as while I was in China — an amorphous, slushy, pudding sort of consistency. Limbo is a state of stagnancy, a lack of stimulation. My life and brain are both incredibly stagnant right now, breeding parasites that seek only to drain away my existence.
The past few months have been spent applying to grad schools — my lifeboat into some other sort of life dimension. They’ve all been submitted, and now is about the time when I’m starting to hear back from them. It’s still pretty early, and I’ve only heard back from 2 out of 7 so far, but I’m already at 100% rejection, and it’s hard to take rejection well when your life is a mosquito nursery in a barrel of pudding.
It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to need a contingency plan yet am too trapped in limbo to think. I’m all for suggestions. This is what I get for studying what I wanted to study.
Bummer.
Well, you can try asking the rejecting departments what they thought could have made your application stronger. There’s always next year.
And, there’s always the circus. Never forget that.
I can empathize deeply, Jeff. This is when you tie a knot in your rope and hang on because something WILL come up and things WILL get better. Then you can look back on this era as one of those hellish times you survived but don’t care to repeat. I know this because the sun is peaking through what has been solid cloud cover over me for a year. I’ll be rooting for you, dear boy.
Well, you already know that things get better. (Congratulations.) And you already know that things didn’t have to get better. I guess the one positive thing that can be said about painful experiences is that they given a thinking person more compassion than he might otherwise have. A lot of the qualities we want in ourselves come from experiences that we’d rather not have. That’s not all bad.