I'm taking a break from my application writing to send you a letter. I'm going to be honest with you in saying that I have not spent my time brewing over the details of our relationship. I try to bring what I have to offer with me when we meet, but as you can clearly see I've been losing patience and gaining in aggression the last few days and for that I'm sorry.

You asked me to write you today with an update on how I'm feeling. I imagine that you intended a brief message - not a letter - but besides that I'm not sure what you expect or hope for the content of this message to be. I'm feeling depressed because I'm lonely in general and our emotional breakdowns only make this worse. Because of my inability to reach you and effect any change in our condition I feel profound frustration which brews into anger when you ask me "how I'm feeling" or "what we are supposed to do" about our shared dynamic and eventually melts into despondency when I am alone in the gray silence of this apartment for too long. I also feel disappointed, not for you but for this season, because it feels like christmas has been cancelled and after this difficult summer with my parents I was really looking forward to some holiday cheer, not with confronting your existential doubt.

This application is making me tense. I feel like my education did little to prepare me for either the objective world or my subjective specializations and its becoming clear as I attempt to write about them. I want to improve myself, become sharper and faster, articulate a better project and cultivate a mental temple of wisdom and clarity. I've spent a lot of effort exploring the concepts which interest me and it now feels like a ripe time to make something more concrete with these ideas, to make use of them, to stop wasting. I'm determined to make this my priority. I want this for you too, so it's difficult for me to not be able to access your creative mind. There's a lot of reasons for this, as we've discussed, and it continues to weigh heavy on me.

I've spent a lot of my life navigating my own selfishness alongside my desire to live a completely selfless existence and have negotiated a conscious position in the gradient in between. Perhaps I am more untethered from the world than most but I remain firmly rooted in my sense of self. On this point, we are not in the same territory. I acknowledge that I need a certain quality and quantity of recognition and reciprocation to feel loved and loving and this has been unbelievably difficult for me to gather since I've been here in Norway. It's different now than it was this summer, or at least I am seeing things differently. I still want to meet you half way but it now feels like I've passed the half way point, that for my position it requires taking a few steps back and encouraging you to come forward, even though I suspect that your "experience" will interpret this as neglect. I hope you can come to understand that this is for my own protection and well being, for the sake of timing and the particularities of these circumstances (application deadlines, stress about where I'm going next, wondering what will happen when we part, etc).

I don't have the answers but I do have many strategies that I'm trying to remember and put to use. Everyday I wake up and try to remember the person I want to be and it feels empowering. I believe that discipline keeps us in balance, stops us from spinning out of control, facilitates the focusing of our individual strengths towards overcoming the perception of weakness. I hope you can develop your own strategies and take a few steps forward, in your own way, at your own rate. In the meantime I will try to stay focused on my own actions and redirect the energy which could be wasted in argument back into creative processes.