Who stole your enthusiasm?
I've gotten into the habit of saying "get excited" sarcastically. As in "Spanish quiz tomorrow, get excited!"or "About to start that 20 page research paper... Get excited!" And recently, I've been struggling to be actually excited about things. Whenever I'm truly excited about something, I tend to play it down and my demeanor suddenly becomes "too cool for school" as I pretend to be mildly amused while suppressing the desire to jump up and down and laugh and giggle at something that sets my heart aflutter. Where did this reservation come from and why can't I shake it? What causes me to cover up an excitement that is bursting from within me? My theory is that somewhere along the line, high school probably, someone convinced me that my enthusiasm made me nerdy or childish and so I chose to reign it in and tone it down in order to please some standard I thought I had to meet. There's a well known quote from John Green that