Our lifestyle, our thoughts, and decisions face us with people, who have things in common with us. Perhaps by this regularity I always find myself in the circle of people, towards whom the reality is not sufficiently flexible, or the contrary.
My protagonists are young people, who have left their studies incomplete, and are occupied by another work, who are puzzled, tangled in their thoughts, and do not have the answer to the question of what they would really want to do. If this is a problem, then it is one of institutional types, because, if from one side, this is an apostasy, from the other, it’s a way of self-examination. The reality, the social and educational structures, and customs do not give them the opportunity of finding their way. They are neither helpless, though, nor lazy. They are just not ready to come to terms with what is being dictated.
I don’t remember the years of my studies with pleasure, though I was studying free of charge. During time university education lost its value, graduation diploma lost its significance, and I didn’t attend my graduation exams.
I don’t imagine how people do the same work in their whole life or for a long period of time. That seems to me unbearable, and the diploma seemed to be a symbol of withdrawal against the background of all this frustration then.
The most irritating is the notion of the elder generation; if you haven’t found your way now, finish, you will never manage, you are not exemplary.
One needs strong endurance to live under this pressure and not to believe in it.
I get nervous now when they ask me – how are you, how do you do? It seems to me that people are in reality asking what did you do, what did you decide, what are you going to do with your life, how are you going to earn money? I don’t have the answers of these questions, and I feel despair because of all these suffocating expectations.
You begin taking up questions for yourself, to get to know yourself, but people around already have the stereotype, as what you must be, who you are. And you just need to make compromises all the time and comply with the expectations of everyone. While I want to be in different places, to learn a lot, to have much experience, to do different things, to feel free, to choose myself, to be wrong, to try again. I want to be myself.
I have left my home, the university, I have left many things behind to understand, to have time and space for that.
And these are decisions after which I feel natural, I feel my righteousness. I feel that I don’t lie at last.
I have tried to study two different professions at two different universities. I wouldn’t say I didn’t manage it well, but living simultaneously and studying was incompatible. I don’t think I have failed myself. On the contrary, I feel free and happy now. I think only in that case one can make right and sound decisions.
Fights, smoking, drinking coffee, hanging out was in the first place at the university, and I understand it now when I am out of the university.
In all the rhythm of exams, studying, rehearsing, again exams, you don’t manage to understand why you do that, if you really want it or not.
I have just let myself understand that I don’t want to be a part of the university and studies, and that’s not the end of the world. Even in that case one can be successful and have a profession.
I am a barman now and I love my work.
I have not left my studies incomplete, but I feel that I have something in common with these people, because in all cases the problem concerns the whole system, where institutions repress, instead of giving the opportunities of self-realization.
The resistance against the predetermined professions, against the dictated lifestyle by the family, against the ways of being “right” and the values is mostly a self-defence in its narrowest sense.
In the end, life is the biggest and the best school, and one doesn’t need a diploma for that.
