One Abnormal Girl

So here’s the thing.  I’m moving to California.

It’s pretty self-explanatory, given the distinct lack of graduate school in my future.  I could try again, and I may, but the thought of enduring another 8 months of my current life until I can even apply again, and then another 3 months of it waiting to find out, and another 6 months waiting to go (if I were even accepted) is depressing, to say the least.  I’m atheist: to me, this is it, this life is everything, and I feel like when it comes time to go I’m going to be absolutely crushed under the weight of regret.  I’m afraid of death, but I’m even more afraid of wasting my life.  Because in the end, feeling as though I have fulfilled my self-created purpose is the only thing that’s going to make dying any better.  It’ll always terrify me, but lifting the impending sense of regret is the only salve.

So now that grad school may not happen–now that one of the larger avenues of self-fulfillment is (perhaps temporarily) closed to me, I’m faced with a gaping void, and where I am right now, there are no paths forward, only away.  I have family here, but I have no friends, and no career choices that don’t make me want to cry.  And I need a career.  As much as temping makes working bearable, I need benefits.  I currently have none, and that makes me especially uneasy.

So I’m moving.  I’m moving to a place where I can see my friends several times a week instead of a few times a year.  I’m moving to a place where I have a much higher probability for finding a job that might help lessen my future regret.  I’m moving to a place where I won’t have to spend so much money to participate in my favorite hobbies.

One week from today, I’m moving back to my parents’ house to start saving some money, because with my current expenses and current salary, I can afford to save nothing, and I’ve never had a savings account.

Nine weeks from today, I will be en route to California with the help of the incredibly generous crazyloststar with some essentials and the cats.  A few of my possessions will follow by mail, but for the most part, I’ll be parting with almost everything.  It’s a sad thought, but a grown-up one.  I want to be an adult.  I’m not an adult yet.  Life is supposed to be more than what I’ve got.

And I’m excited.  Once things work out, many of my sources of depression will be gone.  There may be new sources, but for the most part this will be a positive change in my life.  But things have to work out first.  I need to convince someone with coveted favor that my skills and my interests and my intelligence make me worth having.  Thus far I have been unable to do so, be it for good employment or desired schools.  (Penn State was the school I settled on, not the one I really, really wanted to go to.)  I just want to accomplish something that makes me cheer inside.  I want to finally get something that I really, really wanted.

But even if I don’t, at least I can be around the people I want close to me on a weekly, if not daily, basis.  The absence of that is probably the biggest weight on my chest right now.