Have you ever felt insignificant in an environment that is so significant to you? If not, allow me to tell you how much it really does hurt and how overbearing of a feeling it is. There are some people to whom you could give the world, and they wouldn’t appreciate it. Your status would not elevate at all, because your status is not changeable; you just are who you are, you have the importance that you have, and you can’t really do anything about that no matter how hard you try. It feels a lot like being born into a “destined” caste system, in that even if you make the sacrificial attempts to elevate yourself, it doesn’t do any good, but now, I am beginning to get a bit repetitive.
It’s just that, sometimes, I feel as if high school never ends, if you will. You get to college thinking that everything will be different, and don’t get me wrong, it is; it’s very different, but the behaviors are different while the outcomes are the same, which is that someone gets hurt, because even though it’s typically a much different kind of drama, there is still a lot of drama. In this particular situation, I can’t exactly call it “drama,” but what I mean is that in high school, there were always people, like me, who were being ostracized in one way or another, such as myself, and again, it was under much different circumstances then, but really, that’s kind of how I feel now.
I feel as if there’s a ranking of importance that is consistently occurring just about everywhere that I go. Ideally and I would like to think somewhat realistically, there is not supposed to be a system of ranking in a group of friends. Obviously, in everyday life there is, because you’re obviously going to be more important to your significant other, for example, than you are to the stranger to whom you say “hi” at the newspaper stand, but in a group of friends, I don’t think that that type of thing should be occurring, and yet, I feel that, for me, it does, not necessarily frequently but from time to time.
I really do not want to go into specifics here, but I feel as if I have to if my goal is for you to understand how I am feeling. As I mentioned in my most previous blog, a group of friends here, my best friends here, really, want to live in the townhouses next year, an idea that they have been talking about for quite some time now, and initially, as much as it went against what my plans originally were, it was a bandwagon that I was prepared to jump on despite the inner-conflicts that I was experiencing as described in my most recent blog, because I didn’t care as long as I was with them, but I had an epiphany today, and not the good kind of “Eureka!” ones that happen every now and then but instead the bad kind of “Oh, no!” ones that happen even more often.
This epiphany was one that I am surprised I have not thought about prior to today, but whatever reason, I haven’t. To be perfectly honest, the only reason that I am here at this very moment is because the financial aid award that I received from SUNY Oswego was and is incredibly generous, and what I realized today is that since the townhouses are a bit more expensive than the residence halls, I will most likely be expected to pay a great deal of money out of my pocket since I very seriously doubt that financial aid would increase my award due to me living in the townhouses. I sent them an email quite recently asking them about it, but I honestly felt a bit embarrassed doing so, because I am essentially asking them if I will receive money due to a decision I ultimately make to live in a more expensive setting; it seems like a ridiculous question to even consider.
How this plays into what I was saying before is that I told them about this today, since today was really the first time that I really began to consider this, as I said before, and it didn’t really seem to faze them. The only thing that seemed to really bother them is the fact that now they have to look for yet another person to live with them, since they need six. I just feel as if it had been someone else besides me who was experiencing this problem or who, for that matter, decided that they didn’t want to do this, then the entire idea itself would be shot, because they couldn’t possibly do it without one of them but can without me. As I’m sure I have said before in a blog entry, I do tend to be a bit paranoid at times, and this does tend to have negative consequences in my life, but I have also noticed that it’s almost always people that I deeply care about toward whom I feel paranoid.
At this point, I really have no practical solution. My good friend David from home said that he might be able to come up here for school since he currently goes to a community college close to home, but here’s the problem. Most likely, he won’t be here next semester, which means that since he’ll be considered a transfer for the Fall 2010 semester, I will not be able to request him as a roommate, and even if I could, he most likely won’t be officially admitted until after I have to select a residence hall and thus a roommate, and the problem is, apart from my current roommate who is a part of the aforementioned group of friends, I don’t really have any guy friends here, not ones that I’m close enough to to live with, anyway.
I just don’t know what to do. I can’t help but shake the idea that the happiness and the near-perfection that I am experiencing now is one day very, very soon going to be obliterated due to change that I have no control over, change that I don’t understand why needs to happen, but change that I cannot and ultimately would not want to stop, anyway. My expectations are not to control peoples’ decisions, and I am certainly not self-centered in the least bit, especially not to the point where I’d want someone to completely defer an idea of theirs due to me and my monstrously long list of problems. I guess that I’d just like to feel a bit more important to people that are very important to me. Who knows? Maybe in some elaborately epic way, everything will work out. Sometimes, the universe has a way of self-correcting itself.