Remember when you were a little girl and your parents were divorced so your dad moved to Eastern Oregon and you spent every school break with him in the high desert with no friends where you baked in the summer and froze in the winter and nobody understood your bookish, protofeminist ways?
And remember how 20 years later you noticed that Bend, Oregon has become a boom town but you could still literally pay cash for a house like some kind of pimp rockstar magic man?
And then remember how you spent the next 12 hours obsessing about how you may be a genius or a fool, and you’re terrified of either outcome.
Also Bend is landlocked.
And what kind of shit is that?
I mean, you weren’t even happy in Anaheim. And that’s only 40 mins from the beach.
Could a $25,000 house really change a person to that extent?
But the air in Bend smells like sage and pine and there’s a river running through it and lakes all around everywhere.
And people go outside, like, for fun.
Anaheim doesn’t have any of that shit. The air in Anaheim smells like fireworks and fry grease that spreads out from Disneyland in a great toxic cloud of misery and consumerism.
The only river in Anaheim is the river of misery we call the 405.
Surely Bend has some other feminists by now.
Right?
Internet, this is not how I envisioned my later 20s. I thought there would be a lot more material goods and a lot less angst about it.
I got another rejection letter today. This time for a job I really, actually wanted. I feel a certain degree of terrible. But at the same time, the business’s is going great. It’s pretty much a clear sign of where my efforts are rewarded and where they’re basically for shit. So, my life is pointing me towards business ownership. However gut wrenching that can be.
I think back to all the times I thought something was ending and I have enough experience to know that ending was only half the story. But I also remember having a feeling of exhilaration for those endings, a level of hope for the future and nervous anticipation of what might be in store for me. As much as I try to cultivate it, I’m not feeling that this time around. Since my lay-off, my emotional state has bounced from panic to resolve and back again, but never to excitement. Never to the kind of gleeful free fall I used to see as the silver lining. Is this just part of getting older? A sign I’m picking the wrong path? Or maybe it always took me this long before thing’s started looking up and I’m choosing to remember the good times rather than the bad.
What I do know is that I’m very tired. Not just because it’s late and we had a long day. I’m tired of worrying and I’m tired of trying not to worry. I’m tired of working and of trying to relax. I’m tired of everybody looking sad at me and I’m tired of everybody trying to be encouraging of me and I’m tired of acting like I know I can pull this off or that I am at peace with the fact that I feel unemployable even as new clients call me and respond to me at higher and higher rates.
It’s not even like I want another office job (unless you’re about to offer me one). But I got dumped and I feel unwanted and unworthy and it sucks.
All I can do is keep doing what I know, keep an open mind to the future, and trust my experience that everything works out. I don’t see a light at the end of this tunnel, but I’ve been here before.
That’s not a great moral. I feel like I should have some kind of reassuring words of wisdom, having come from such a low place so many times before. But I don’t. Life can be shit. And all you can do is keep moving until one day it’s not. And even though I know this, and I’ve done this, I’m not being very gracious about it. I’m whining, and bitching, and trying to run away to Bend or Sausalito or an office job or anyone who would have me just so I don’t have to be this person right now. This sad, awkward beginning that doesn’t have a clue.