Babbling Bubbles

I felt myself gearing up to argue when I realized the professor was just using it as an example, and that it wasn’t up for debate.

And I realized how excited I was to be able to talk about it and fight for it, even just on a small scale.

So… what if I became a reproductive justice advocate? Or something to that effect?

I mean, the efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade and the attacks on women’s rights are never going to stop (much as we might wish they would, I don’t see any kind of national epiphany in relation to women being people at any point in the near future, unfortunately), and we need more people to fight for this. I want to be that person who does that.

My brother asked me the other day if I was going to become a “career feminist,” which was apparently meant to offend me, but like… all I could think was, what if I were to actually do that? Could I do that? I wanna do that. Someone tell me how to do that right fucking now.

I will admit that when I have nothing else going on (which is, you know, about 98% of the time) it’s mildly tempting to find, like, a Tumblr boyfriend or something, but even in just the few times I’ve ever been consistently texting a guy, I’ve hated it. I just want to talk to him and hear his voice and see his facial expressions, and since a huuuge majority of how I communicate is through body language, I never feel quite right texting someone unless I already really know them. Otherwise it’s just… Wrong to me.
I understand that there will be people (vast numbers of people) who meet over the Internet. I just don’t think I’ll ever really be able to do that myself. I mean, it’s great if that works for you, but I just don’t think it’s for me.
And then I look around, at the articles about how much dating is shifting to the Internet (Jezebel), and about the couple who met over Words with Friends of all freaking things (also Jezebel), and I worry that real and true face-to-face communication is dying. Even just the articles about how soon we won’t need physical wallets, because everything will be on our phones (Newsweek) are scary to me. It’s like we’re losing the physical world, bit by bit. An article on Jezebel.com literally started by saying “As we become slowly mentally melded with our computers…” I mean. This is not okay. I can’t be the only one that doesn’t think this okay. This is scary as shit. Especially considering that I’m sitting here, on my iPhone, typing at a mile a minute, with the Internet and my music and Tumblr and Facebook literally at my fingertips. I mean, I never put this thing down. It is almost always within my reach. Really the only “benefit” of it is that I now know a ridiculous amount of trivial shit from Cracked.com and a decent amount of pop culture-y shit from Jezebel. Which really isn’t beneficial at all.
The future scares the shit out of me, basically.

I’m changing my major to Law & Society with a minor in Women’s Studies and a potential double major in Psychology.

I know I said I was cool with being directionless, and I am. But this just feels right.

Not five minutes from now, not five days from now, not five weeks or months or years from now.

And the more I think about it, the more okay with it I become. I’m eighteen; I’m young, I’m stupid, and I have no future. And it’s glorious, really.

Dear god.

Seriously though, this whole “Hey, I know it’s been my life plan for a couple years now and all, but I can’t be a Social Worker” thing is sorta freaking me out. I mean, I was like really proud of myself for having the entire decade after high school graduation planned out: four years in college in an accredited social work program (resulting in my diploma and a social work certification), a year to get my master’s, and then two years working for a government agency before getting a job as a high school social worker. Where I would probably stay for a very long time. So actually, I’d planned more than a decade. I planned basically my adult life, as far as career is concerned.

And now I’m like… wait no, you idiot. You forgot to account for your own mental stability.

Oh. Right. That might help.

So now I’m looking at what else I might do with my life, since destroying myself does not seem like the best idea, and I’m thinking, You know what? Fuck it. I’m going to become a fuckin lawyer. I like law, I’m fucking intelligent as hell (if I do say so myself…:D) and I can still help people, but not in a setting that’s going to, you know, kill me. 

So I’m probably changing my major to Law & Society and minoring in Women’s Studies. I’m going to think about it more, but I’m fairly sure it’s what I want to do. Which is a weird concept, for sure. But I can still do everything I wanted to, just in a more personal-mental-health-friendly way.

One of the few things still left intact from this summer is my friendship with one of the few girl Creatures (my “term of endearment” for all the skater kids/townies from home) that didn’t hate me. She’s a sophomore this year, so since Kristen and I were around all summer, we sort of took her in as one of us. There were drama issues, of course, but that’s any girl friendship. She’s fucked up in a lot of ways and just needs some help. We’re not super close (she’s closer with Kristen, because I think Kristen wanted to be friends with her since I would be leaving at the end of the summer) but we still talk, and she’s one of the various lost puppies that I seem to collect - I always want to help people to the point that it winds up hurting me, so my mom started calling it Lost Puppy Syndrome, and so now I refer to those people as my lost puppies. Pathetic, I know.

Last Friday, she got kicked out of her house. She didn’t sleep Friday night - she wandered the streets with another boy from home who’s currently homeless. She stayed at her boyfriend’s house last night, and she’ll be with a friend tonight and has plans to stay with other people until Wednesday night, when she’s no idea what she’s doing or where she’s staying. She said there’s an empty mausoleum in a cemetery in town that she might be able to stay in, horrifyingly enough. So yeah, she’s a very lost puppy right now.

I can’t take care of her, obviously. She cannot live on the floor of my dorm room. I can’t figure out a way to get her to school every day. She is not my responsibility. In addition to that, I don’t trust her - she will screw up relationships for me, interfere with a lot of different things, steal god-knows-what (Adderall gets about $5 a pill, so I’m sure she’d go after that) and just generally Fuck Shit Up.

And yet…

I can’t help it - she’s in trouble, and she’s my friend. So of course I’m trying to figure out what I can do for her, how I can help her without it hurting me. But I really can’t think of anything, which is killing me. Of course, there’s Kristen, who could be helping her out, but it doesn’t sound like she is. She doesn’t want to move back home, but she’s too young to be legally emancipated, so if anyone from the school finds out, she’ll either be forced to move back home or forced to move to Tennessee with her father, which she does not want to do. She’s stuck.

I know I can’t help her except to be a friend, to listen when she needs to talk and offer suggestions when and where I can. It’s just painful for me to be so powerless.

And this is where I have to stop and think about this situation and realize that if I’m sitting here, well aware that I can’t do anything and feeling so distressed over it, how am I going to be able to cope as a social worker? To be completely honest, there’s just no way. I can’t do it. I’ve had this realization before, and I’ve pushed it aside, but now that I really examine it, I just can’t. This is not where my life should be headed because it will more than likely be the death of me, though whether I’m speaking emotionally or physically I don’t know. I’ve wanted to be a school social worker for the longest time, but it’s insanity - logically, I will be able to help perhaps a small percentage of the kids that will go through my office, but I’m an idealist and will think that I’ll be able to save them all and when the crushing reality of the situation - that I’m really pretty powerless, that there are countless lost puppies and so few that can be helped, let alone saved - sets in, it’s going to fuck me up irreparably.

I need to change paths now. I know I do. But to what?