“And when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, Freedom or Loneliness?”

I have left school for a while now and I don’t know what to do with myself. I suppose it’s a general feeling, one that is widely felt by people like me who, in spite of what they would like to believe, rely on academic institutes and the coercing hurricane of assignments to lead them through their life. Academia just gives you a course of action. Ironically, academia requires no thinking at all. Maybe that is why many academics become teachers. If you ask me, I think you really have to be aimless in life to find yourself as a teacher.

Yes, I wake up most days with no plans because I have no essays to write, research to do, or revising to complete. There is no deadline at the end of the month, no electrifying but draining anticipation of a test next week, and no checking the computer one more time to see if that teacher has submitted the grade yet for the last one. I go to bed at night after no late night study sessions in a classroom, no movies have been watched with friends squeezed into our busy schedules, and I do not lay awake wondering what this is all even for, whether my final grades matter in the slightest, or if they matter too much and this is all much too risky. The one parting gift granted to me by my dear life in school: doubt.

What I really hear in this quote about (what feels like to me) aimlessness, is silence. Direction really fills up your head with all its certain thoughts: “I must do this”, and “I cannot do that”. You see, I have not left school forever, and so I am living in an in-between state. It is awfully, brutally quiet. It simply feels like waiting. Which I also find absolutely stupid because I chose this myself. Last year, I could not trust myself to continue to university without giving myself a break (my secondary school was a bit, or a lot, more different than your ordinary high school experience. Think four roommates, isolation, and dramatic tears. The last bit is quite ordinary I guess), because I craved a break so deeply within my bones. I felt like I was going out of my mind with all the work and impostor syndrome, and I thought that there must be more to life than that. I used this break as an excuse to put off my college applications as well, so it worked out quite neatly at the time. Now, I live with the excruciating boredom of that decision from my past self. I am simply waiting to get back to school and have some hand steer me forward like a puppet master. To give me direction. There may very well be more to life. How do you find that “more” when you are just waiting to step back out of it in a year?

So I have no sense of direction to “wake up in the morning” and “wait for me at night”, and in this somewhat of a life I am living right now, I can do almost whatever I want. It certainly feels like freedom, I can tell you that. I wake up most mornings and think: “Well, what should I do today?” My options are often limited to some domestic tasks like baking a cake or reading, which sound like the schedule of the daring life of an elderly woman. 

I have a job, I don’t want you thinking that I’m some wealthy teenager moaning about their woeful life. For reasons I cannot be bothered to type, I cannot work many shifts at this job at the moment, and so I feel that I have much opportunity for “freedom”. I am finding that freedom is incredibly boring. And very lonely. This quote reminds me of my life in several ways, firstly that I have no direction, and secondly that I have no friends. (This is not entirely true, but I was going for dramatic effect.) Freedom is lonely when you’re the only one who possesses it. I dare say freedom is useless to a human when you’re the only one who has it.