Spirit of the Wind

I haven't been doing that well lately. For the most part my issues are academic in origin, but I'm a college student, so that affects everything else. So when my grades suffer, or I feel like I'm not doing well or understanding the material well enough, I get depressed, I start to seclude myself... These days, it feels so hard to care about anything, and I feel powerless, useless, and flat-out stupid.

One thing I do know is that I'm not cut out for architecture. I've dropped one of my classes, ARC 242, which was a woods class. I liked that class. I liked the teacher well enough, I liked the lectures... but when it came down to it, I just wasn't capable of doing well in the class. I'm still taking Pyramid Guy 2: Electric Betelgeuse, aka ARC 232, but only because taking both classes will get me a fine art credit. Which I need.

I've also learned that when it comes down to it, I am very much a coward. Rather than deal with the possibility of humiliation, I flee. Not entirely surprising, but still a problem.

So I don't know entirely what I'm going to do. I do know that I'm transferring to zoology, and that that might help somewhat. I know that I won't be going into architecture, and that a fundamental part of my identity is gone--as fundamental as my identity as a therian, or my identity as a skeptic.

Architecture was how I justified my own existence, and how I avoided going insane from the knowledge I had. My belief was--and still is--that if we as a society are ever going to amount to anything of importance, anything that lasts, we have to broaden our horizons and be willing to work with any other sapient species in the universe. Also we'd have to avoid not wrecking our environment. In any event, we had to more or less get over our own egos and stop seeing ourselves as the center of the world.

Space--not outer space, but the environment around us--shapes how we relate to each other and the world. When I see something like Faner Hall, I see something that, in addition to looking like shit, was antithetical to the ideals I believe in.

A long time ago, I decided that that would be my mission--to design buildings that were closer to this, and attending architectural classes, I was always struck by how buildings that I considered absolutely abominations were praised. Seriously, there was constant praise for the same philosophy of design--and the same exact person--that produced this. That was what Corbu would do to Paris. Meanwhile, the terminology and phrasing used in describing designs, and design philosophy, frequently seemed overcomplicated.

But I can't do that anymore. I know that I will die. I know that everyone I love will die, and we shall all cease to exist. I also know that unless we somehow beat the odds, the universe will die. Ultimately, even if our legacy manages to survive the Sun's death, nothing will experience it. Nothing will benefit from it, nothing will look upon it and say, "This is good." We might as well have never existed.

I don't know what, ultimately, my path will be. At the rate I'm going I won't have much of a significant one, since both this and last semester I haven't done so well in class and this naturally causes crippling levels of anxiety and lack of confidence to the point where I wonder if I'm at all suited for college.

Granted, I don't have to decide for a while, and I need to focus on getting my life straightened out first, but not having certainty is... scary.