Summer is lame. Don’t get me wrong; I love having enough time to reread the Harry Potter series and watch movies and lay around with my cats. And I really love spending time with my family and getting to be a daughter again. Work isn’t even that bad really; at least I get to feel like I’m accomplishing things. It’s just that in the long stretches of free time, it’s harder to hush up the parts of me that ask, “Who am I?” and, “What am I doing here?” School is a brilliant counter to these sorts of questions. It keeps me so busy and so on my toes that it almost answers them. “Who am I?” “I am a college student.” “What am I doing here?” “I’m getting my degree! Which is very important and necessary.” Whereas in the summer, the answers become more fuzzy. “I am a…person. A young adult? Something like that. And I am staying up too late messing around on the internet.” There are no easy answers anymore.
I remember hearing something sometime about “holy discontent,” the feeling you get when you become less and less comfortable with what’s happening around you and more and more driven to change it. Like when Jesus got angry and started throwing the moneychangers out of the temple—he just couldn’t stand by and watch anymore. So maybe that’s what’s happening here; maybe I should be hoping for the questions to get more difficult to answer. Because maybe if they annoy me enough, I’ll finally start to figure out who I am and what on earth I’m doing here.
-Kellia
