With every day I spend in class and working on the pile of assignments that have, quite literally, taken over the empty spaces on my desk, I can feel every ounce of motivation I’ve had depleting. It’s as if someone has shot a syringe into my arm and extracted the energy I used to have, only for it to be in no one’s possession – all that optimistic thinking spilled down the drain. Even those around me that used to don bright smiles that reflect a crescent moon are dying into the norm of a “Korean student”, but what’s even more devastating is that we’re in university. If we were all back in our senior year of high school in this country, it would be understandable, but at our age and the grade we’re in now, it’s a little…odd. It feels as if we were all tulips – not roses, since they are highly cliché – that have been grown in darkness, then taken out of the closet to be exposed to the beaming rays of the sun on the windowsill, only to be placed back into the dark abyss, even though we’re promised freedom again in, in this case, a few days. The darkness of stress that brings down the once happy friends around me are putting a strain on a number of things that shouldn’t be regarded as difficult. The sunlight, the freedom we need, is only a few days away, but the process of getting there is what’s killing us all on the inside. 

Maybe the pessimism will be free from my system as soon as I finish what I’ve been working on all semester, but there’s no actual guarantee of it, which is what scares me the most. I’ve been dying to write like I used to before I entered school, but I cannot find the time to do so, nor the energy. I’ve replaced all the creative aspects of my words with academic ones and it’s getting harder for me to start where I left off before. It’s as if I’ve been traveling for years, rested at a shelter, and opened the door, only to see snow covering the entire land that I’ve traveled and yet to travel – there aren’t any footprints to direct me and I have to start anew. Maybe, just maybe, I can make my hands spew out the art it used to before I let it all drain from my fingertips.