Intellectual Burnout!

Exactly two months and one week ago, I was a bubbly varsity senior with only a semester left to my big break and a newfound vibrancy for learning entirely new things. According to the misdirection of those short-lived academic energies, I enrolled myself for an International Administration class (cheers to the UN employment aspirants like myself!), a Media, Crime and Culture class in Sociology and got served four piping hot cores and options. On top of that I had an entire UB-based research project before me! You can imagine my anticipation of all the things I could possibly achieve if I were to nail every single aspect of these modules!

Well, school happened. Today I am A tired skinny 21 year old dragging her feet through campus, gazing at deadlines with hazy eyes and rummaging through her bag in hopes to find “The Plug!” to get a re-charge therefrom. Two words for this sad case: Intellectual Burnout. The glistening ambitions to be UN’s youngest one day has faded, International Policing “a yina that thing” and judging by all that I have to take in during a 7am Human Rights class, I probably wont be a Special Rapporteur to S.A.D.C for cultural rights anytime soon. My adrenaline is at zero. The Plug must have been intercepted by little green aliens.

So I open the door to my tiny res room, curl up on the bed and go blank. Eyes wide open, but blank. What’s missing? Love? Passion? God? Food? A new hairstyle? Someone must have lied about college. The glossy brochures I got at the fair lied! One lecturer of mine has even expressed concern over the gloomy sunken faces of seniors who were once radical and ready to take the criminal justice system by storm.

I dropped that International Administration class. I try to jog in the mornings; I have reduced animal-based protein in my diet; and say my prayers on my knees at random hours during the day. Only two months left and I’ve had enough of this academic thing. If I met a high school graduate right now, I’d probably advice them to go hiking on the sand dunes of the Kalahari instead. But in all honesty, couldn’t the task to emancipate society from its bonds of psycho-social ignorance through education be placed on society itself?