Getting long-winded about hate and fate

During graduate school, I did something I'm not proud of -- something that I'm only now beginning to be able to deal with. I hated somebody. I know we say things like "ohh I HATE her," but hate, like love, is a word that we often fling around casually. Those who have people they love know that how we feel about spaghetti and how we feel about our friends and family do not remotely deserve the same word. I hate Twilight. But I hated this girl.

I'm not going to go into what she did, why I hated her, because I'm never going to be able to get over it and deal if I keep flinging mud. Suffice it to say that I felt justified in the emotion, though it was a scary one to possess. Not even the girl who unwillingly stole my boyfriend in high school was on the receiving end of something that damning. And anyway, we're friends now. It worked out.

But this person... Let me back up a bit and explain that it was a hard year. It was like high school again, which I felt was completely ridiculous because we were all in our twenties. But still, every day of class I felt like the band geek trying to sit at the cheerleader table. As you can imagine (and probably know), I was not cool in high school. And, as cruel fate would have it, I am not cool now. Well. By their standards, anyway. So it was a hard year, because most of my college friends had graduated and left me there, and I suddenly went from having a large handful of similar-interest-having buddies to.... being condemned to the Left Side of The Room. Left-siders were.... "other." I did eventually bond with my fellow lefties, but that there was a division at all was a problem.

Graduate school is hard. Nobody really prepares you for how much harder it is than college, and really, it's weird that it is so much harder. Especially for me - because I had grad school and college in the same school. But it is harder -- so much harder. The work is harder (don't let the fact that you have considerably less class hours fool you), the homework takes longer, you put together portfolios, projects, and papers, in MUCH less time than you ever would have dreamed possible in high school. Add to that the fact that I was working part-time AND student teaching, take away almost any trace of a social scene, and you've got a year that is challenging in pretty much every way.

That kind of an obstacle produces a lot of negative energy. Everything was stressful, and when I tried to unwind we were either forced to stay in town because I was working or making the very trying one-hour commute home. All that frustration needed an outlet, and one pretty much presented itself to me in the form of my own personal scapegoat.

I maintain that what the person did was uncalled for, though for the purpose of this discussion what she did doesn't much matter. But what I did in response was equally uncalled for: I took all the frustration with class, fear of not finding a job, loneliness of having no friends, mixed it up in a salad bowl with pretty much anything else that gave me trouble over the course of that year, and mentally dumped it on her head. Anything that went wrong was her fault. Not directly of course -- she couldn't be to blame if I waited until the night before to write three papers -- but somehow, cosmically, it added up. I needed someone to hate, some target for all this negativity inside me -- and she had done something terrible to me already. It just fit. It worked. So, for the rest of the year, she was my focus. Hating somebody takes work, just like loving somebody. When you love somebody, you have to look past all the flaws, the mistakes, the quirks, and love the spirit of the person. Hate requires almost the same process. You have to teach yourself how to be so utterly unforgiving, an un-movable wall of loathing. The difference between the two is that with love comes rewards. You have the comfort of knowing that when they look at you, they too can look past the flaws, mistakes, and quirks and see your spirit. You make each other happy, you grow with each other. But when you hate, there is no good outcome. It's even worse if they're unaware of the daggers you stare at their head, because then you might as well be pouring all this darkness on the floor; it does you about the same amount of good. And sometimes you trip in the mess and wallow, not letting in any of the light around you.

It's not a healthy place to be. But the past year was like trying to fight my way out of a meat grinder -- almost nothing seemed to work out. And now, I am the last the last person from my class to be without a job. It's humiliating, really. But then it does seem to fit in with the meat-grinder year. A year where I never felt I belonged, where I grew to second-guess myself, felt invisible, and then ultimately at graduation more than one person couldn't remember my name. But that's not the girl's fault. She is not where I need to be directing my negativity. I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe what goes around comes around. I believe that, if I spend an entire year refusing to take responsibility for my problems that it would follow that I'd have to continue to have problems until I can grow up and deal with them.

Call it God, call it Fate, call it the Universe (and say it's out to get you -- Matt), call it "Ceiling Cat" (though that's usually who you pray to when your feline friend is in trouble), call it whatever you want. I believe in it -- and I believe that the pieces of the Life Puzzle do eventually, somehow, fit together. There are lessons we have to learn, hurdles we have to jump, and monsters we have to fight. Sometimes the monsters are really ourselves, the inner, darker, slimy creatures that we keep hidden most of the time but have to face eventually.

It's funny, because about four months ago I had a plan for the future. I was going to try to work at the local school (a school I LOVE), and if that didn't work out I would substitute until an opening came along. But then I got desperate. I started fearing that I wouldn't have the dream job, so I chased dream jobs all over the sate (and a few other states). Now, at the end of my search I am exactly where I was four months ago. I'm guessing this is what was supposed to happen.

And speaking of what's supposed to happen, I can't help but feel that the past year might have been a meat-grinder because it wasn't the right thing to do. I applied to exactly one MFA, didn't get in, gave up and pursued another degree -- one I got in without really trying. What if, as a dear friend puts it, the Author of my Story wants their protagonist to do something else with her life? What if the fact that I was given an offer that was then taken away due to a technicality, and then walked into a minefield of a sample lesson presentation -- what if those are walls that have been put up to give the character of my story a detour? What if I need to spend more money, more years in school, and get an MFA, pursue a different path? I'm not going to do anything crazy or drastic right now -- but I can't help wondering if nothing is working out because it's not supposed to. I absolutely loved my student teaching experience, and the actual learning part of the year was incredible. But what if I'm supposed to be somewhere else? Maybe this isn't the plot the Author of my Story really had in mind when the first pages were penned. And maybe one day, I will figure out what kind of Story this is supposed to be.