Adrift

Somewhere here recently, I think I lost the plot. 

It's not the first time it's happened. The story that they told my generation was, "After high school, go to college. Your dream job will be waiting for you after. Just keep your hands inside the cart and your harness buckled until the ride comes to a complete stop."

Don't look at me like that. I know how naive it was. Five years after graduating I'm finally grasping how much work everything takes, and how much of an entitled privileged white girl I was for thinking it would be handed to me. If I had the opportunity to go back to 2008 or 2009 to meet myself for a day to pass along some wisdom, I would squander 23 hours and 55 minutes just slapping that b*tch nonstop. The last five minutes would be spent either dishing out some tough love, or more of the slapping. It depends how much I would end up pissing myself off.

In the end, I've come to terms with all that. I mostly manage not to mope about wasted time chasing things that I couldn't have. Really. I tend to blog when I'm feeling down and need to express some feelings that are a bit too big for my voice.

Just recently, that lost feeling is because we're moving soon. Despite that it's not very far, it's got me edgy. Maybe because for a few of the times I've moved, I did it feeling like my world had caved in and my only option was to dig out and leave everything behind. Similar scenarios evoke the same feelings, even if it couldn't be further from the truth. Some people take well to moves; I usually have a bit of anxiety about them. I'll mope around in the new place for a few days, wishing for the old place if for no other reason than the familiarity. 

I know this will pass. I will make the new place home too, find new places to explore and new things to do. When that lost feeling gets to be a bit much, I console myself with the thought that I never could've imagined being here, yet it's also exactly what I need.

In the Desert

Writing about myself feels like pulling last week's leftovers from the bottom of the fridge & trying to convince myself that I'm still hungry for them. Except that there's an added element of danger in writing, because there's never the emotional equivalent of a bear trap lurking in your leftovers. There's possible food poisoning, but that's only risking a day spent on/near the toilet. Dredging up old memories to try & write about them--SNAP!

When I'm happy with my life, I just want to live it. Enjoy every moment, whether it's trying out a new restaurant with Wook-Wook, or smoking a cigar on the front lawn. I'd add in the occasional vodka tonic but it's not October 30th yet, so that will have to wait. Only 60 days to go!

The times I've been sad, or discontented, or furious? I just want them over with, & once they're gone, I want them to stay where I put them. I'm still bitter as hell over what I've gone through. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to remember & it's draining. Why bother? Why not just let those memories sit on the bottom shelf until they've disintegrated?

What good does it do to remember how it felt to realize I was nothing but a body to the guys I dated? That sickening feeling of being flesh & only flesh, that it didn't matter what I thought or what I felt or what I hoped & dreamed for. That all was just a minor annoyance to deal with to them.

To remember that I failed a lot of my friends? I avoided phone calls & texts & made excuses so I could stay at home & brood. There was a sense of wanting to spare them from seeing me so depressed, but I know I pushed them away. That was me, not the depression.

To remember what I dreamed about having at this point in my life? I have the feeling a lot of people, even if they're happy with how their life is now, just like me, they still remember the "could haves" & get sad.

Why? Because it is bitter. And because it is my heart.

Doubt

Ever since I graduated, I've drifted. I'm now at the point where I have a job that pays well, compared to minimum wage, rent & my bills are always paid on time, & I have some left over each month to save against a rainy day. Still though, that drive that says, "You should have more" won't stop.

I want to own my own home at some point. At the same time, I'm almost thirty & I don't know where my career is going. I don't even know that I have a "career" or just a "job". There is a difference, & I wouldn't want to gamble a mortgage on it. I don't have the funds for a down payment or enough to act as my own landlord. Plumbing breaks down in an apartment, you call maintenance & maybe have to go to the gas station to use the bathroom & skip a shower for the day. In a house, you shell out however much the plumber will charge & choose between gas & groceries until payday.

I think about the time I wasted after graduation feeling sorry for myself & I squirm. I was where I was due to my own life choices. Only myself to blame. I could have gone to graduate school, or chosen a different major. I could have gotten out more & met more people. That whole year after is the one I wish I could change.

I know where I go depends on me & what I choose to do. I'm not sure what that may be. Lately I've been wanting to get more education. MIT has their open courseware that I've begun to explore. I may start with that & see where it goes. I could go back for my MFA in creative writing, though that doesn't have a lot of appeal. The other option I started to look into is law school. For requirements, you don't need a specific undergraduate degree. There's the application process & having to take the LSATs. There's also the time & money concerns. If it helps to improve my prospects, though, it could be worthwhile. 

It's always the time that I come back to. I'm at the age a woman almost has to choose between family & career goals. I don't want to have a baby anytime soon with how uncertain everything feels. I'm aware that I have a window, however, & that I might not know how limited it is until I'm seriously attempting it. I've gotten very selfish with how I spend my time, & I don't want to waste any more of it. 

I'm tired of having to answer the questions I ask myself with "I don't know". "Where will you be in five years?" "Where do you want to live?" "What kind of job do you want to have?"

Only 90 days to go

This past Monday, after downing a vodka-tonic & a vodka-lemonade, I decided I was going to stop drinking for the next 3 months. It was for vanity reasons, I'll admit. I've noticed that I've gained weight & just generally had a puffy, bloated feeling for some time now. 

I woke up Tuesday with a relatively bad hangover: headache, nausea & feeling faint because I was dehydrated. I spent the day drinking water at work & by 5, I felt back to "normal." That night, no drinks. It wasn't hard to do, given how sick I had felt that morning.

What I didn't realize was how much drinking had insinuated itself into my life.

I woke up Wednesday with my body ready to battle the headache & nausea again. It almost felt like it was there for real, until I reminded myself I hadn't had anything to drink. Then I relaxed. That's also happened the last 2 mornings as well, my body bracing against the expected pain, then relaxing when it hasn't come.

That tells me I've been drinking more than I should have been. My body needs this break. I don't like to throw around the word, "addict," mostly because I've known a few & it's something that some of my family members have struggled with. To say that I'm one seems to trivialize it. I haven't had cravings to drink again, granted it's only been 3 days now, but it's been relatively easy for me. I've seen people that literally couldn't go a full day without a drink or a joint unless they were incarcerated.

In the coming weeks, I may change my mind, of course. I'm still at the start of this, after all. I really didn't think my body would be bracing for a hangover every morning, so that proves I don't have full insight quite yet.

I decided that if I make it to October 30th without drinking, I will buy myself a bottle. Not of alcohol, but perfume. I recently bought a sample of Lyric Woman by Amouage & fell in love with it. It's a smoky, mossy, spicy rose with an incense & cardamom-drenched drydown. It's also $275 for a 50 ml bottle. However, the 100 ml bottle is only $315. It's like they're giving me 50 more mls just for spending $40 more.

On that note, I will wrap this up with a self-portrait I took in my bedroom just now. I have no idea if not drinking is going to have an effect on my looks or not, but I did want to take a picture in case there is one.

 

 

The Question . . .

Once in a while, I read a line in a book that stays with me. This one comes from a book I read in college, American Pastoral by Philip Roth:

“Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, "Why are things the way they are?" Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn't even know the question existed.”

It's the truth. We are all so blessed that when senseless things happen, we ask, "Why?" It's easy to forget that so much of human history has been utter misery. Mumps, measles, whooping cough & polio once took a deadly toll on children; now they are all easily preventable by getting vaccinated. 

Once upon a time, if a mother's blood type was incompatible with her baby's, both their lives could be in danger. There could be a miscarriage, or the baby could be born with Rhesus Disease. Some historians think this is why Anne Boleyn was never able to bear a living child after Elizabeth I was born. Now a shot can prevent this from ever happening.

There have been times when I had to choose between buying gas for my car or groceries. If I chose groceries, I ran the risk of not being able to get to work and missing out on 8 hours of pay. If I chose gas . . . well, I already knew feeling hungry wouldn't kill me. Even then, though, I knew I had a sort of safety net. I could ask my family to buy a few groceries to get through to payday.

In short, in America we have been born into a land of abundance. I'm not saying there's no one that went to bed hungry in the US last night, or that we're not plagued by violence, death and sickness. I'm saying we've been told that this abundance is the norm, it can go on forever, and we will always keep improving.

I don't think we can. My generation has been taught to consume. That we don't have to give back. That we can leave it up to others to change things, now cut out that press conference and get back to that "Modern Family" rerun. What will happen when we're in charge? 

It's almost criminal how we don't give back. We look at all the blessings of our life, and our answer is, "More. I want the man/woman that I want and I won't settle for anyone else. If they reject me I will never let anyone else in. I want a well-paying job with health insurance and paid time off and if I can't get exactly what I want, well I'm too good to flip burgers." We believe that our possessions will show people what we are; we're right, but not the way we think we are.

So what is the question that the title refers to? For me, it's "What can I do?" What is it I'm supposed to do? Do I even have the ability to help others? Because I believe we should be helping each other up, not tearing each other down. We have this abundance, we are able to fall back. We should be giving back.

Looks Like Up to Me

I haven't been myself lately. I didn't recognize why right away, maybe it was wishful thinking. With depression, you always hope it doesn't come back.

I know that I have not had it as bad as some of my friends and family who have also struggled with this. When it got to be too dark for me the last time, I went to a counselor for talk therapy. I changed some things in my life around, and for the most part, it has worked. 

I never had to be on medication for my depression; I was aware that there would be a lot of side effects  and that I might have to try a few different ones just to find one that would work for me. I didn't want to go that route because I felt for my depression, much of it was due to patterns of behavior and thinking I had gotten into. When I was able to break those, the dark moods were beatable.

This week, though, I started out Monday feeling like a wreck. It was my day off and I wanted to try to accomplish something, but that was not happening. I tried to blog and barely got through a single paragraph. I ended up watching TV most of the day and had a glass of wine around 3 to get through the rest of it. I even cried just a little. That was the sign to me that something was off. This could just be due to hormones, it is around "that time." That's what I'm hoping.

I haven't been taking very good care of myself either. I'm out of shape and that discourages me. I'm going to try and get a bit healthier and see if that will help stabilize me. It helps that this isn't anywhere near as bad as when I went through it before.  I'm also prepared to face it down in any case. It will not define or beat me, I kicked its ass once before.

Solitude

"I never said 'I want to be alone.' I only said 'I want to be let alone!' There is all the difference." - Greta Garbo

I don't play well with others. I will never be considered the life of the party. My idea of a good time is a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, tucked into a good book or video game. Being around other people demanding my time can overwhelm me.

There is, however, a difference between solitude and loneliness. To me, being lonely means I'm wanting company, a friend or my boyfriend, and for whatever reason, they can't be there. I'm wanting human contact and not getting it. 

Solitude is a chance for reflection. To learn something I didn't know before, about the world or about myself. It's almost like meditation. In a demanding world that measures you by what you can give it, solitude is how I recharge.