Sober Morning

Sometimes I look at myself and ask: what am I doing? what am i doing with my life and how am I helping the world. because there was a time when I felt i was doing something to help someone and I don't feel that anymore. on this campus i'm mostly made to feel that, if i'm not doing something political, i am doing nothing to change the world. and yes, there is great need for political change but it is not the sole way to force change and rearrange. i know that. i believe that. i just used to know what i wanted and now i don't. i spend most days thinking about nothing when i used to think about how i could move apathetic people (note: not just politically apathetic) out of their seats, how i could touch person and not people, or how i could touch people and not statistics and i chose the arts - or rather, i found a place where i felt like i was speaking to people and not ones with highbrow opinions. not everyone in the voting booth is a columbia poli sci major and it was to kill a mockingbird that convinced me that the death penalty was wrong, catch-22 that showed me that realism wasn't robotic, the fountainhead that inspired me to stop living my life on the terms of others, a clockwork orange that taught me that all we have is choice, eternal sunshine that reinforced my belief in humanity. that's it. i used to believe so much in humanity. and that people are people and i accepted that people are not perfect and will crack under pressure and will succumb to temptations because we are not one and one is two. and that is what turns the world. the faults that give us our strengths. and i was writing odes to that strength and warnings to the world saying don't forget that strength and i believed something so strong and it carried me on to my next breath and i was alive. but now all i can think of is why is emptiness a virus that changes face each season. it worked for morrissey because there was blood in his cage, but all i have is the thought that all my thoughts are trivial and how can we be right about anything when life is so fragile? and i don't want to die having done nothing and all i know is how to write about it and i don't even know what i want to do with my next step. and i am tired of nineteen years of peeping through my peepholes at people and i want to act now. but on this campus direct action only refers to something political. sometimes i think politics is the belief that we are perfect in a world where perfection means we are never wrong. but i'd like to think that my foot in the march is saying something. if it is saying something.