And after all is said and done

Maybe there are too many sad stories in the world. Or maybe there are too many good things, that the bad stories somehow stick out. Yes, I think that is so.

Anyway, this post is supposed to wrap up my the first semester of my second year in university. I don't know, I've been procrastinating writing because I have so many mixed feelings about it. It's definitely been the most emotional and confused 6 months of my life. I remember crying myself to sleep on too many nights. In some ways I think I was grieving even before I had much to grieve about. I was crying from the anticipation of grief? But anyway, crazy emotional ride, death, life, puberty, adolescence yada yada all that. And the pressure of trying to get good grades, to write that perfect essay that will never be perfect, the inertia to write, the inertia to read, the feeling of inadequacy, the feelings of stupidity and loneliness.

If this is what growing up and volatile hormones are like, I don't think I signed up for it. But after all is said and done, I am grateful for the experiences. Sometimes I read the posts I wrote when I was 14 and 15 and 16, and it strikes me how unsympathetic and not empathetic I was as a teenager. I just couldn't understand why people behaved in a certain way, and I was full of scorn. I may still be full of scorn, but I think I understand what emotional trouble feels like now, and people have my pity haha. sux 2 b them.

Super grateful though, to have taken Romanticism which was by far the most stressful of my mods because I wanted so badly to make a good impression on Dr A. But reading Keats who was young, poor, a poet and dying of consumption/ tuberculosis (he died at 25) helped me to come to terms with my grandfather's then imminent death. I haven't totally come to terms with it, and I can't believe it's been almost 2 months, but Keats's Ode to Autumn and Ode to a Nightingale perfectly expresses what it's like to live in dread of dying, and yet always the conclusion that life and death exist in a connection. Where there is life, there must be growth and where there is growth, there is decay. Death is inevitable, but how much sweeter it makes life seem! I read Ode to a Nightingale so many times that I burst into tears hahaha as the words sunk in. "My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk."

Imma miss my grandparents, Christmas won't be the same without them.