Feeling Heavy

In a week and half, I have a campus-interview, and a 35 minute presentation to go with it. I have six pages of the presentation written down, and I feel vastly unprepared. Part of it is just that, I have too much stuff, and I feel like cutting it down to 35 mins. (15 pages roughly) will be a hard task. I am nervous, and I am procrastinating. Anyways, I will have to make myself work on it as soon as I am done with dinner. In terms of other things in life, I have been thinking of love, friendship and hurt a lot. Yes, I do have a few intense friendships in this life where things aren't always smooth. Yet, I do not want to let go of them. I know, any therapist I will go to will say exactly the opposite. But I am not someone who believes that I need to drop my friends and loved ones at the emergence of first (or second or third)sign of conflict. There was a time when I used to do that, but I think, growing older has changed me in this respect. Honestly, I have become more aware of human mortality, and this awareness of death does change things. In my present life, I am trying to do two things:

1. Letting people know I love that because I love them and support them, it doesn't mean I am letting themselves off the hook.

2. Trying to avoid meanness. In recent past, I have wished loved ones immense suffering, all because what they were doing were hurting me. But honestly, I shouldn't have done that. Meanness, and pettiness do not change things.

I am beginning to feel, and think, that if I need to see certain things change in this world, I need to set the example myself in my own little way.

I have always believed that work (creative, political, scholarly) is more important that personal dramas and personality issues. To a certain extent I still do. But I am also realizing, work is also embroiled within personal dynamics. The kinds of work I do are especially fertile grounds for them, because at the end of the day, we bring our personal histories into our creative/artistic work, political work, scholarly work.

Normally, I don't write such personal stuff in this blog. But I am writing this down, because I want to be accountable to these processes I am undertaking.