Chapter Five: Drifting Off and Slowly Sinking (~jinghan)

My belly feels bloated, and my brain too. But not the crammed-with-interesting-thoughts sort but the blubby-useless-for-anything sort. It’s so bloated that I can’t even work out why I’m feeling like I’m slowly sinking in a world where other people have noble and passionate goals and I’m just drifting through.

It’s Monday. And I’m staring at the sheet of paper before me.

Exercise 1

a) simplify abs( (π+i)^100 / (π-i)^100 )

My first practical class for mathematics, and I’m struggling with the first question. Three months of not doing any maths: I feel like I’ve been knocked back to square one. I look around, everyone else seems to have caught on to the knack of it and are proceeding to the second question. I stare at the page: something I could have easily done in high school. And, I vaguely recollect, I would have actually enjoyed working on such a problem. But right now, I stare at the paper, and the little maths symbols flounce around my head like flippant butterflies that refuse to land. What was wrong with me? Why is this such a struggle?

“How was your day? What are you up to?” I text to my boyfriend studying med in Adelaide. Maybe he will reply with something nice and make everything seem better.

“It was okay. Doing tutorial prep. What about you?”

It’s what he’s been doing every day of last week and this. I stare at his questions. What was I up to? To be honest, I was thinking about how what he’s studying seems so noble, hardworking and with such a certain path to walk. Me? I want to teach secondary maths, a thin line on the ground that I’m chasing hoping I’ll find a pot of gold before I lose interest and fall off the trail. I was so sure and passionate about this just last semester, but right now I’m not feeling it. Do I have what it takes? Is this where my heart wants to go in life?

I wafting from class to class wondering why I was studying what I’m studying. The people in my class talk about interesting theorems they have heard about and want to studying in the future, while I’m desperately scrabbling my brain trying to remember everything that I learnt in high school. I recall that at one point I was that enthusiastic about new and outrageously ambitious maths, bouncing on my toes to be learning things, but right now I just want something comfortable and familiar to cling on to.

My brain feels bloated. And my belly too. Perhaps its because of being sick and being stagnant at home for so long. Maybe I need to get out, clear my head and then slowly step through all the things I’ve learnt so far. I need to walk this bloated feeling off.

I plug my ears with the ipod to drown out my increasingly pessimistic thoughts with calming abstract music. I’ve never done this at this time before, but I don’t look back as I head out for a walk in the warm night air.

My head is filled with drowsy mystical music. Pools of light collect under the street lamps. And it surprises me how beautiful the park looks like at night. I have the whole park to myself and there’s a sort of peace, room to think, away from everyone else’s ambitions and goals.

I sit on the swing and surge forward in the grey night. Above me the dark shapes of bats are drifting, almost aimlessly, across the dusk sky, some looming large and close to the earth, and some but a fleck high in the sky. The bats make the sky look as if it’s a dark pool of water pulling forward and forcing everything into the same aimless drifting. I close my eyes. As I swing forward and the air rushes past me; for the first time in the week I feel a sense of power and that familiar thrill that makes you want to do things with your life. It’s comforting to know that the feeling is still there, that I’m still who I am, and I’m not going to throw away my dreams just because my brain has grown bloated over the holidays. I fly away on the swing and leave all the drifting bats behind me.

Tomorrow would be just another day to drift through at uni. But I think I’ll make it a day where I put determination on my face and concentrate on working at my subjects… until that feeling of enthusiasm and competence comes back to me. (And then I’ll wing it from there.)