In the last two years, my mind has experienced loss in previously uninitiated ways. I've come to accept perpetual loss as the only reality in my life. I lost my mental stability. I lost a sense of personal ambition that I had reinstated by maneuvering an incredible academic turnaround. All of it. I lost two, three people who meant the world to me. Real, good people. When they left, they didn't leave holes I could fill with others. My experiences with them are now barely believable memories. Memories that I can't seem to touch or draw anything from. Especially Kay, who, by talking to, thinking about, and sometimes thinking for, I had so internalized into my life that when I lost her, I even lost my power of catharsis about the loss.
I moved on. I reconstructed my life, very imperfectly but did nevertheless so. Now, it doesn't really resemble what broke, but that's not a useful objective.
While being distantly conscious of it, I worked myself back into my academic trap, set in the far past, an equation which I had recklessly purged myself from a year back. I was sick of this life here, and I had deliberately disconnected myself from every concern to do with Singapore, NTU and my obligations from the six previous long years. I had summarily refused to remain at knife point anymore.
So in reconstruction, I distastefully retook the baffling academic subjects that, more than ever, seemed to not have anything to do with reality. I focused where I had to, and pushing, pulling, procrastinating, I prepared for my examinations and did just well enough in them. It was not a heroic feat. Admittedly, it took less from me this time than it had on previous occasions because I was now familiar and numb to the whole drab method. It was utterly joyless, which might have something to do with why I'm still waiting to be jubilant about successfully passing them.
I find myself now, having graduated, and basically with absolutely nothing to do, doing nothing. There is the task of finding a job and a source of income, an urgent task that in the first few weeks, scared me witless and now just regularly nags me. Going with it are these considerations of finding a job - to my liking, a job I can sustain my mind in, and less obligatorily, thinking about my future and where I personally want to be.
Noticeably, I am more agitated about the optional concerns - what I want to make of my education so far, what I want to pursue now and how I can not waste any more time and resources before doing so. (Madhav thought my situation as analogous to being trapped under a rock for 6 years and then scurrying around chaotically when suddenly freed.)
I hesitate from taking a completely chalked out, rigidly structured approach to this. At this moment, I don't have even a loosely structured one. I don't know anybody else who thinks about the subjects I think I'm 'interested' in, with an equal or greater degree of personal attachment. "Law", and my loosely defined niche of it (elaborated later).
I have issues with thinking of them as "interests". I'm sick and tired of this universally regenerated, interest-career-hobby cycle of education and life that doesn't reconcile personal welfare with personal philosophy. I myself have trouble separating career and financial concerns from the process of charting out a course for myself. It makes me sick. I don't care if I make no money out of it, but I can't afford not to. At this point, I am 60,000 S$ in student loan debt and every minute bit of financial news alarms me. It's also not easy when I am in the hideous financial shape I am. I wouldn't survive if it weren't for Dionne's help. I can count on my fingers, the number of times I have had to use my wallet in the last 2-3 months.
The only distinction I am trying to make is between completely liberating myself from this organized system - studying law, constitution, governments' responsibility to the public, private and corporate accountability to the public, economics, individual liberties necessary to sustain democracy and the complex mechanism of private citizenry historically affecting larger society - and losing out on the theory, vast amounts of research and history already on record - or serving and learning within the system, while aware of its nature to insulate its scholars from real-world concerns and distract its practitioners with personal ambition at the expense of their moral responsibility. This is a decision I need to make as soon as possible and I am already inclined to the second - to study (work) within the academic system.
Because working outside of the academic system would involve the additional burden of having forever to rely on a "main" job - the most favourable scenario being teaching - and having to live the rest of my life with this single, piss of a degree in mechanical engineering.
