Jumping the Track

Ok, so I haven't updated this again in a while. It's kind of sad when you check back in to edit the profile, and it lists you at a different age than you are now.

I've probably got a lot to post about, but I think I'm still working through most of it, so for now I guess I'll just talk a little bit about the fact that I'm 30 now.

Yeah, I know, 30 is just a number. But it represents a lot of things. Like the fact that I'm yet one more year working in retail at Home Depot and making excuses why I haven't left yet. Or like the fact that my age has finally caught up with my dating pool, as I always preferred the company of 30-something gay men to anyone else.

I honestly had been looking forward to 30 a great deal, though. My 20s were a little bit of a train wreck in terms of the fact that they started out with me feeling like I was on a train ride where the rails were already set in a certain path, and that's where I was going to go. Well, I jumped that first train when I went off and lived in the New Haven Catholic Worker instead of taking the obvious path out to grad school. Then I jumped it again when I moved to MD in order to parent.

My own train got derailed a bit when I was laid off by NMAC, and I honestly have gotten to the point where I really don't like the train I'm on. To the point where that grad school train is looking extremely worthwhile. Heck, I'm even considering law school now.

But even through all this, I've already found myself making excuses that tuition is too difficult, and that the failure of several banks that provide for most financial aid means I likely won't be able to make it. I've cut myself off from the possibility of working anywhere other than the Task Force, and yet I haven't really done enough work of looking at other places to really know that there aren't a ton of other places where I'd really like to be.

And even through all of this, I haven't gotten myself up the motivation to actually DO anything about this. I've actually allowed myself to become the victim of my own apathy, a trait that I railed against everybody else for having throughout my school days. In that time, nobody seemed to care about anything but their own career paths, and in the meantime, now, I'm stuck with apathy over that one very thing. It's almost mocking in the sense that it's almost as if they were all right, and I was wrong. I focused on the wrong things at the wrong time, because I didn't focus on myself and make sure that I was taken care of. And now it's a struggle to recognize that I have to be my own priority.

So here I am at 30, trying to figure out what it is that I want to do, and needing to build up the will to make it happen. I guess the first step to that is getting off of this website and setting myself some priorities... We'll see how that goes next time...