caerula's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ick factor Last night I was crashed out on the couch after YMB went to bed, while Blue watched hockey and ate a sandwich. And for some reason, my brain went into overdrive. I started thinking: it's been almost five years since I met Blue, at a New Year's Eve party. Five years. Longer than I was in high school, longer than I was in college. And this means it's been nearly five years since grad school, five years since I moved back to Michigan from South Carolina. I'm as far from grad school, now, as I was from high school when I started grad school. That's an awkward construction, but I can't think of it any other way. When I began graduate school, I was five years out of high school, I'd been to Europe twice, was embarking on an ultimately disastrous and heartbreaking relationship, was living away from my family for the first time, and was making the best friends of my life. In comparison, the past five years don't seem nearly as exciting, even though those were the years in which I quit three different library jobs, lost my virginity (yes, I was 26. Shut up.), got engaged, got married, became a stepmother, bought a house. What's Europe and heartbreak in comparison? I suppose age has something to do with it. Between 18 and 23, I was very young and naive, and everything made a huge impression on me. Everything I did took on huge importance and meaning. I romanticized a horrid relationship, and the ending of it seemed like the end of the world. Going to Europe was the fulfillment of a dream. Going to graduate school was the beginning of a new era, a new me. I'm sure when, five years from now, I look back on this period of my life, I'll see changes, but right now I don't feel them. I feel like the same person who moved to Lansing in October 1997 to start her first "real" job. Another part of it, I think, is expectations. Whether I realized it or not, during the first half of the 90s I was doing pretty much what I'd expected and hoped to do. College, Europe, dating, grad school. None of it was exactly like I thought it would be, but I was essentially following my plan. But when I left Michigan in 1995, I never thought I'd come back here to live. I never expected that I'd meet my life partner on a holiday visit home when I lived hundreds of miles away. If, five years ago, I thought about where I'd be in 2001, I never seriously thought I'd be married, with a child, living in the town I grew up in. Sometimes it seems unreal. Even after Blue and I had dated for a while, I didn't really think he was The One. But he is. And it's not that I would change anything; it's just sometimes I feel I should be doing more, that I'm wasting my potential, letting my mind atrophy. I've wasted a lot of time these past five years, wishing for things to be different and not doing anything about it. I can't do that anymore. I can't keep living with this nebulous unhappiness that has nothing to do with my external life and everything to do with how I feel inside. I made myself extremely unhappy last night, thinking about how great and full of possibilities everything seemed in grad school, how even the pain was worthwhile because it meant there was something happening, something important, and how now I just feel stagnant. I get up, I eat toast, I make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I go to work and come home, shuttle YMB to ice skating and school events, watch hockey or football or whatever with Blue, and go to bed. Everything is so laid out, every day is so similar. Something has to give. I have the feeling that I've been very rambly in this entry. That's how I feel lately. My mind skips from one thing to the other, recalling old hurts and joys, remembering 10 year old conversations better than I remember what I had for lunch yesterday. I feel old. Maybe it's a turning 30 thing? Which isn't old, I know, and I won't actually be 30 for 14 months, but I have such an "end of an era" feeling. Maybe it has something to do with my baby sister getting married. Minnie is barely the age I was when I moved to South Carolina, and she's going to be married in -- god, three weeks. It's very weird. But I do know I have to do something, that I can't keep feeling physically and emotionally icky. This ick factor in my life must go. So I've decided to do something. Now, I just have to figure out what to do. 9:49 a.m. - 2001-11-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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