I was optimistic when I started this semester. I was smiling during long lines in enlistment, I was hopeful during queues, I was praying every night.

I tried to go home early every day, browsed through piles of readings, digested accounting entries, wrote debits and credits over yellow papers now crumpled and gone. I tried to be diligent and tried to work hard. I wove my own promises, smudged illusions, hoping that at the end of it all I would feel contented.

Right now I am questioning all the effort, I am shattering my own pretty picture of the power of optimism and positive thoughts. I am wailing, I am wallowing, I am trying to put up a screaming kind of drama and despair.

I am waiting for my parents to call. I want to tell them I am so afraid to look for my own path to a happy career. I want to tell them that I want to be obedient and to stay in here, twiddling calculators, posting entries, swimming in concepts about money, profit and corporate greed.

I want to be an obedient child. I want to see them retire in convenience right after I graduate or right after I pass the bar or whatever. God knows there is something missing. And I am feeling it now, months after I realized that cutting economics is more meaningful than listening to Solita Monsod dish out putang inas. There is something missing whenever I spend nights and days stuck on my accounting book, only to stare at red marks splattered on my test paper weeks after.

I hope this is a phase. Like what Leya said, perhaps I am still gaining speed, adjusting to this kind of discipline I never fancied way back when I was still a small child writing stories on worn out Advance notebooks. Perhaps this is the dilemma when you get scores as low as eighty per cent of you batch mates. Perhaps this is the feeling when you think you would have been better if you were doing the things you really love.

I told myself I can be multidisciplinary. I told myself to think about my family whenever I have doubts playing inside my head. I told myself it’s not an easy ride for everyone, that this is my one big trade-off in life.

I want to do the things I cannot do. As much as I want to feel happy and contented, I feel that something’s missing. Something bothers me. And it’s not the absence of a love life.

God knows I just want to be an obedient child. I love them enough to endure wallowing every day, and posting sad blog entries with the thought that it’s the best I can do to assure myself that the next day might be less dramatic and frustrating.

I just want to get through. And I am not suicidal. I just want to be an obedient son and an obedient brother.