I know there is nothing wrong with the fact that I use this blog to ramble on about my thoughts and feelings about life. But reading back through my recent posts (most of which aren't particularly recent, but I digress), I don't think this little corner of the blogosphere represents me fully. Yes, I spend a lot of time struggling with anxiety and depression, the disorders that so often rule my life with iron fists. Yes, the enjoyment of young adulthood and contemplation of growing up are a very intimate concerns of mine. Obviously I will be writing about these things. There is nothing wrong with nostalgia or musing about my life. But whenever I look at my blog I gag on my own self-indulgence.
While this blog is a testament to my thoughtful, sentimental inner life, it tends to under-represent another part of my inner life. The part that is deeply invested in politics, closely interacts with literary texts, seriously contemplates literary theory as well as philosophy and psychology, and spends quite a lot of time considering various other intellectual topics. I don't say this to sound intelligent or important or pretentious, although inevitably it will sound that way.
It's ok to say that you have graduated from university and it's nice if you are proud of your degree. To mention that you are proud to have graduated Summa Cum Laude, however, is pretentious. I hate that valuing intelligence is labelled as pretentious. I am really fucking proud of being smart and I don't want to be humorously self-deprecating about it. I'm a nerd and I don't mean that in any cutesy kind of way. I am beginning my post-graduate study in English specialising in the text and transmission of early modern literature and I'm planning to forsake financial security to devote my life to academia. The only part of my undergraduate experience that I enjoyed was my classes. I complained about the workload at Oxford, but the hours I spent reading in the Radcliffe Camera are now some of my fondest memories.
Most of my anxiety stems from the unreachable academic standards I set for myself - in my mind, it doesn't matter that I'm only 21, I expect myself to be writing essays as intellectually sophisticated as the articles written by tenured professors that I reference from scholarly journals. I am proud to say I went to Syracuse University, but I am applying to top tier universities for my PhD study (Harvard, Oxford, etc.) because I want to surround myself with the best literary thinkers in the world. I am committed to becoming a serious writer - in my creative writing I aspire to write meaningful works of art, and most of all, I wish to contribute something important to the reading and writing of literature. I pride myself on being intelligent, even if my mind is not the most impressive you will ever find*. The fact that I value intelligence and seriousness is a very important part of my identity. I don't care if it means I'm pretentious.
All of this is to say, that there's a seriousness to me that I wish I could share here. But for some reason I don't bring the serious side of my personality or interests to this blog. I find that I can't write about this article I read about American politics or this one about the state of American poetry today or this one about balancing the purposeful and the beautiful when writing sentences. Mainly because I don't want to sound pretentious.
I can't promise that this blog will suddenly become very intellectual and sophisticated. It probably won't. But this blog is a representation of me and at the moment I feel like it's full of Pip while lacking Rosalee**. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I like to be serious sometimes and I don't think there's anything wrong with that***.
*I'm smart, I'm not a genius. I have no delusions of grandeur. I hold myself to standards that I know are well beyond my means. The title of this blog is massively ironic.
**Very convenient that I have two names, isn't it? My therapist says that I shouldn't treat my different names as separate identities...but I've always relied heavily on compartmentalising my life. England and America, school and home, internet and "real" life, my depression and the exterior I present to the outside world, etc.
***Yeah yeah yeah. Cue The Joker reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_5dP_83O7o
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