After many years my college career is coming to an end--or at least I thought. I have met my match with Senior Seminar and have gone from worrying about a silly piece of gold rope on my shoulder to wondering if I'll cross that stage a fraud. Sometimes my professors just do not like me. This is the dilemma behind the English degree--not every professor will like your work. So I play the game. I go to office hours. I prove in class that I have done the reading and offer my opinions or theories on the texts. However in this case, it is all for nothing. I just try harder and dig a deeper hole. It's like I'm drowning and all my paddling towards the surface is only moving me farther down into the abyss. All this came to a spear head last week when my fears of failure became even more real with a gruesome presentation.
So today I sit in my chair, humiliated and beat down I stare at the dest. I want to hide within the pages of my text and listen as my colleges present effortlessly five page texts while I was stuck with 130 pages. Every word they said felt like a match lit underneath my desk burning the indignity and memory of the horrific moment into my consciousness. I sat and looked at the rows of letters stretch across the page. How can I survive everything I went through last year and the much-less-than-metaphoric collision with I car I lived through in January to let one professor beat me? I looked at my leg and remembered what used to be red flesh, filled with what felt like tiny little knives digging into my every movement--and I was about to let one man take me down.
I scribbled down my thoughts. I dodged the professor's derailment and continued to make my point. While I may be only capable of a high school level reading, my elementary rendition of the text just hijacked the class. I tried not to smile as my peers mimicked my thoughts for the remaining fifteen minutes. Apparently I am not the only one incapable of close reading.
