Back to my Roots

This week has brought a heap of reminders of why I started this blog. It is called Quarter for your Thoughts, because I like English language idioms and word play and my senior year of college I signed up for a creativity workshop and found myself craving an outlet for all my fear and anxiety. All of a sudden I was graduating and I didn't know what to do and I really wanted to believe it was going to be ok, but as my peers know and my elders remember it isn't so easy when you're seemingly surrounded by success ad infinitum. People with dream jobs and dream apartments and even dream weddings abound.

And then it got harder. Because the plan that I did have failed, and then not only was my day to day life unpleasant but I had nothing to look forward to. It felt like I had missed the last train and I was stuck in the unfriendly land of underachievement and underemployment. And it was from this sense of rock bottom that I rallied and harnessed my inner Dana and made Paris happen.

But this all a preface to saying that I feel I've been doing a disservice to my 3 readers. Perhaps you read this as an escape, but I can't in good conscience continue without a word of caution. In the world of Facebook, Twitter, and instagram I fill in gaps of communication with friends with their social media social lives, which consistently look incredible. My friends are moving in to cities and getting real jobs and drinking bottomless mimosas at brunch. They're living the American dream set forth by Rachel Green and Lena Dunham, and when emails and postcards and Facebook messages go unanswered I assume it's because they're too busy tweeting clever things as they people watch while getting a drink before an outdoor concert. Because that's what their lives look like through the  filter of the internet.

But then I do hear back from them. And when there's #nofilter I realize that they aren't doing that well. And while they're smiling for the camera there is plenty going wrong that they haven't told me. Jobs are bad, roommates are terrible, relationships are on the rocks: and yet omelettes appear on instagram every Sunday and profile pics are updated to reflect the most recent cultural outing or booze fest or relationship, even if they weren't that great.

And it upsets me, but if I'm being honest I've been doing the same thing. I learned early on in my Athens blog that if you really write the full range of emotion you
1) lose all sense of privacy;
2) make people think you're manic, if not suicidal;
3) abandon creative license over your own story.
People remember not as you do, but as they remember your blog. And the benefit of human memory is that it allows us to remember and edit our past in a way that makes sense for our present. But putting that in someone else's hands is dangerous. So this blog is much more skewed towards the positive. Or at least the sane. It's also worth mentioning that being 3 years older, I'm just generally a slightly more stable person.

Which is all great for me, but I don't want the people out there who are using this as source material (whether to understand how I am or to compare to their own experience) to think that I have it all figured out or that this is all easy and relaxing and simple and pleasant. I'm alone in a city where I just barely speak the language, which is thrilling for all the same reasons that it's terrifying. And while the experience is intense, in a good way, that also means that everything else is happening at an intensified rate: people are leaving, people are arriving, my brain is kicking out old stuff to make room for French, and to be alone in a city so enveloped in its own identity of romance and intimacy is exhausting.

And on top of all of that, I still have no idea what I'm doing next. Which is to say that I'm more or less where I was 18 months ago, but with a better view. And no, I'm not really in the same spot. But my experience isn't that helpful and I'm still struggling with essentially the same questions.
So, I am happier then I can remember being in years. I feel more centered and more calm and more ready to make those life choices, but I'm not there yet, so just for the record, don't compare. Take it for what it is: a highlights reel, a series of pleasant musings, me figuring shit out on an ongoing basis. I hope y'all can say the same.