I grapple with myself.  Society has ingrained in me so many ideologies that conflict with one another, and I don’t know which ones to listen to sometimes.  Today is one of those days.

I really just want to write.  It’s been so long since I’ve written a poem, since I’ve written anything I’ve really cared about, since I’ve written anything that feels real.  This is the part of me that feels like an artist.  I strive to see the world, experience and feel it, and spit out something that resembles how it impacts me and others like me.  I express.  I am elemental.

I am a traitor.  There is nothing evocative about someone who sits in her room and does her homework like she’s been taught and told to do.  I am just the pragmatic voyeur, and I do nothing to act on the urges of creativity within me because I choose to smother them with scholarly essays or long, seemingly pointless readings or busy-work assignments.  

Today, I have no motivation to do my schoolwork.  What effect are these papers going to have in the grand overture of my life?  None.  But when I think about not doing them, of skipping them to write or read something that I actually want to, my skin crawls and I can’t stop berating myself.  I know that my conscience has been shaped by culture’s ideas of success and what it means to flourish.  I recognize this formatting in my brain.  But it doesn’t make it any easier for me to undermine it.

I don’t know what to do.