once again, entering a new chapter

new chapter, new guest stars, new home, same revelations...

KMVisuals, 2023

I wrote about this before, but here I am once again trying to make sense and find comfort and stability within this new chapter. After an anticlimactic spring season, I found myself in the last week of June packing up my apartment in the worst mood ever. As the seasons transitioned, so did I. It seems like every two years something changes. Every where I look, it seems I’m always saying goodbye.

I’m in a new apartment, living with two new lovely roommates, and a cat that has been ripping up my carpet. While I’m closer to my place of employment, I can’t help but shake this tension I have with myself. I have ideas of what it is. It could be frustration, disappointment, shame — it could be any of these things, and more. I can’t identify it right now. Dissatisfaction? Disinterest? Boredom?

The weird feeling I have has to be attached to the Heartbreak of a New Life. I actually wrote this two years ago. I wrote about finishing my master’s degree and moving back to my hometown and being excited about my new found adulthood, and freedom from education for the time being, while also mourning my previous life. I find myself in a similar state of mind, but this reflection is less excited.

The last two years were something. I lived with a close friend, had two different jobs, took the bus everywhere, and complained a bunch. What a fun time.

I worked a job where I was asked if my gun was pink and was told I had DSLs, by fourth graders who couldn’t read an analog clock. While at times fulfilling, I quickly learned it was something I couldn’t do forever. I was only there for a year, and somehow everyday felt like a challenge. I then found another job closer to what I studied in graduate school, that happens to be at my alma mater. I’ll save my thoughts on that for a later post. What I’ve learned in both roles is that education work, regardless of which specific sector, will run you dry if you’re not careful.

Now, two years later, I sit here in the neighboring city, overtaken by cynicism, boredom and concern for my health. I mentioned this previously in my Writing Group™, but I am always in a state of grieving. I’m grieving who I was at 24. Was I stupidity optimistic? Not at all, but now, it’s harder to find joy in things. I feel so hardened by my reality. I thought 26 would be different.

Maybe it’s the growing pain of searching for comfortability in something new. Growing through the uncomfortable. You grow through what you go through — as corny as it is, it’s true, and I’m tired. Perhaps I should start romanticizing life for the sake of finding joy.

It’s the cycle of life.

—S