And sometimes I still wonder why I keep wanting to preserve old friendships between people who have already drifted so far apart from me. There are many people that I have met and tried to step into their world, just to see how things are alike, but each time that I do that, I realise that there is little that I can do to learn of their world. Sometimes, the world of some folks are just too hard to fathom, simply because one is not in the correct state of mind to fathom what it is that they have experienced. So while there are many good friends whom I still keep in contact with and maintain a rather warm-ish relationship with, there are many others that I've started to slowly let the connection cool down somewhat, simply because it is no longer that easy to keep abreast of how they are doing in their lives.
Not to mention that the conversation topics have slowly turned from warm to cold.
I don't blame anyone for this; each and every one of us have a different perspective on life that we carry around with us. Sometimes these perspectives change, and then we start to learn of other things and mix with other folks whose perspectives are most similar to ours. I'm not sure if I've said it before, but this whole "I am a scholar" thing has always been a little too much to bear for me, simply because after my twelfth birthday, I had always tried to stay as far away as I can from the "glamour road", for I had been there once and the feeling wasn't that great. The whole "glamour road" is a farce of sorts, a kind of self-indulgent means of asserting one's importance in the world, where one's true importance might actually be nothing at all.
I'm probably among one of the most "poor" scholars around—I still think from a very grounded perspective, and still have not seen myself as "one of those who are elite". I'm not an "elite" despite what others might want to say; I'm still someone trying to eke out a living doing what I think I might know how to do. Sometimes I find it hard to balance all these feelings, particularly when I'm mixing with the group that thinks that it is made up of "elite" people.
Maybe I've said it somewhere, but I'll say it here. Sometimes the stories of those who are not so "elite" can teach us more than all the education that we can get out in academia. I'm not the brightest, and I'm not even remotely "bright"; I'm just really lucky to have opportunities thrown at me by folks who care and lucky to have folks who care to lead and guide me through my life. That's why I do not like going around talking about my "real" life to folks—I don't believe that my worth is solely deigned by what prestigious position/role I play. I believe that one's worth is based more on intrinsic values than extrinsic ones; take away all of the awards and leave only my name, and I want all that remains to speak volumes of myself.
And if you guessed that I just had some meeting of some sort with the whole bunch of other scholars, you are right. I generally don't feel this way unless I've just been inundated with a whole pile of really "heavy" feeling elitism. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.
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