Hating who I was had been a favorite past time of mine for years. I grew up with a PhD educated father and a mother who spent the first years of my life working for a big oil company and the second half teaching Latin to junior high and high school kids. My parents, it seemed, always knew what they wanted to be and had achieved it.
For years I wanted nothing more than to be a veterinarian. Thinking back what little kid doesn’t want that at some point in his/her life? Unfortunately that dream lasted till I realized I was allergic to most four legged creatures. So I did what I thought was right at the time, and just gave up dreaming. I justified it with myself by saying “I’ll figure it out later”
I headed off to college with a major of “undecided” and dropped out a year later to move out west to live with and a year later marry the ex. It was in those first few months of moving out that I realized I had given up. I attempted school out there; I sat out a couple semesters (b/c out of state tuition was astronomically high) and worked crap jobs. I headed back to school at the community college and graduated with a associate degree in something (I find this odd. But for the life of me can’t remember. However I do know that it was a degree that had no emphasis and I took a bunch of boring general ed classes to get it. Useful? No) During this time I was working full time, supporting the ex, as he too figured out his future too. But I hated my jobs and remember clearly sitting on the front porch many evenings thinking, “my life totally sucks, why the hell did I do this and what am I going to do”
A side note – getting married when you’re 20 is STUPID.
Logically you head off to a 4-year university after your stint at community college knowing full well what you’re going to do with your life. Right? Uhm, not always. I did what any sensible person would do and chose a major based on my dad. Never mind he has a bachelors and masters in engineering. It was his PhD in sociology that got me. “That seems fun” I thought and declared that as my major. Ha! Ha! Ha!
It was in early into my first semester at the university that I discovered the ex’s other life. I fell apart and took a leave of absence from school. And my life.
That leave of absence was exactly what I needed. Never mind that I couldn’t think clearly, lost 20 pounds in 2 ½ weeks b/c I couldn’t eat or sleep, and forgot how to smile. It was the year into that break that I finally discovered what it is I wanted to do and who I was going to be.
I knew what I wanted, had started the steps to achieve that goal but I had trouble being happy. I was 25 years old, still not a college graduate, living (barely) paycheck to paycheck and living in a shoe box apartment.
It happened years later after many nights of lying awake thinking “I’ll be happy when…… I graduate, get a better job, find a new boyfriend, by a house, travel……. You name it and I can guarantee that at some time or another it filled the blank after when.
But my “ah ha moment” came to me as I was driving to work one morning. I realized I can’t wait for happiness to come; I can’t wait to be happy after I graduate, or find a better job, house, friends, etc…. I need to do it now. And in that moment it was as if a light switched on in my head and this thought, though small, was a Nobel Prize winning solution to my problems.
It didn’t happen overnight and it has been a conscience effort ever since. But there are days, like yesterday, when everything is picture perfect that I find myself thinking, “My life can’t get any better”. These are the days that I think back to the dark period of my life and smile. Because I know that had I not gone through all of that, I would never have been able to appreciate the simpler things in life.
