I've been all over the place since the rug was pulled, but I'm starting to feel some semblance of normal again and I feel like that's worthy of documentation.
As it turns out, crying all the time is exhausting and makes your eyes puffy. Locking yourself in your apartment alone is lonely. And binge drinking Jameson and eating Cool Whip make you fat.
Ain't nobody got time for that.
So I've started doing this thing where I care about my life again. I started focusing on my career, and as such have secured a pretty amazing internship that's going to make me absolutely thrilled to get up in the morning. I'll get to write and be around people that create something everyday.
But not before having to quit a soul-numbing cubical job in which I apply numbers to spreadsheets and contemplate the various ways someone could gauge their eyes out with staples. And not the tiny, regular, good for like 5 sheets of paper staples. The huge ones that go in a stapler with a handle designed for leverage in case you have to staple say, The Bible.
I'm going to walk away from money, and a 401(k), and GASP! health insurance, to work an internship that will barely pay my bills but will make me so happy that for the first time in maybe my whole life, I don't feel like I have to justify making that decision to anyone at all. I haven't second-guessed myself one single time. I guess I'm just not in the business of doing that anymore. Although maybe we should talk again when the bank starts calling about the car payment.
School's also started back which gives me this strangely masochistic sense of purpose. It holds me accountable for something, and that's important when it comes to recovery from apathy and sweatpants. I'm drinking coffee and making myself breakfast every morning and sitting down and working my ass off because I have to. Because I have plans and goals for myself. And I forgot about them for awhile.
I'm writing for a teeny little magazine but I get to open the mailbox and see my story on the cover and it is beyond fulfilling. Because it's what I meant to do.
The magazine is also partially why I had to get up off my ass and post this - they mentioned my little corner of the internet and I'd like to give people something to read that was published after my tiny little bout with my life falling apart.
It's obviously not all the way together. But I don't know if it ever will be. I'm learning to let go of any notions I may have about what I think my life is supposed to look like. Turns out, there aren't milestones I have to hit. I don't have to get married by this age and pop out kids by this age and have an IRA and a mortgage. I don't have to do anything that I don't want to, that feels inauthentic. I don't have to stay in relationships that don't work because I'm in my mid-twenties and shouldn't I be AT LEAST half-way to a mini-van by now?
Instead, my life is filled right now with the most incredible friends a girl could ever have, who tolerate whining and take me out to dinner, and drag me to roof-top hotel parties against my will, and make me feel really super duper cared about. I have a family that is so unconditionally accepting that let me take up couch space and complain. They force me to go grocery shopping because mustard and tea bags and cereal do not constitute a full pantry.
So yeah, in case you guys were wondering. I'm alright. And I'll keep being alright.
xo.
