A loss of will

Suffice to say, I'm not the academic type. I never have been, and while I enjoy learning, I probably never will be. There's just something about school that takes the fun and enjoyment out of things. I don't know what it is. The time limit, the judgements. There's just something about it that takes the things you enjoy, and wrings the fun out of them.

For me, one of the most obvious examples of this has always been English class. I'm a writer. I love writing. And I love reading. These are things that just come with the territory. But damn, if reading books for English classes didn't always drive me crazy. It probably didn't help that, to me, the books they had us reading were always boring and the kinds of books that I would never have an interest in in the first place. But even some books that I would have otherwise found enjoyable, I had no interest in reading while I was in school. Perhaps it was the attitude of trying to dig deeper into the meaning of a book that I simply didn't agree with. Or maybe it was just that we were being told to do it.

That's the thing. Being told that you have to do something always makes it worse. No matter how much you enjoy doing something, if someone tells you that you have to do it, you are going to enjoy it less. I don't know why that is, but it is. We all want to be in control of our own lives, and it can be hard to accept that at times we have to let other people be the leader. We fight it, try to avoid those moments, or try to twist them so that we can be the ones in control. It's just nature. But the fact of the matter is, we can't always be in control.

That loss of control doesn't just affect that one aspect of our lives, though. It starts to trickle into the other parts where we still do have control. It becomes harder to enjoy the things we do for fun when we feel like we don't have as much time for them as we want, because someone is telling us that we have to do other things.

I know that feeling all too well. I almost didn't write this blog post tonight, because I have written well over 2000 words already today in papers that I have to write for school. And the worst part is, I'm not even done writing them. So thinking about writing this post was not an enticing one. I considered just not doing it. I've written well over my 500 word daily goal. Why should I keep writing?

Because I have to remind myself that there are things out there that I enjoy, and writing is top among them. Just not academic writing. "But no one likes academic writing," I hear you say. Well, someone has to. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn things that I have to make citations of.