Today was a stressful day, but I'm okay with that. I was worried the first time I had a busy, hectic day I'd crack under the pressure and have some kind of breakdown. That didn't happen. I handled it calmly and as efficiently as I could, considering the circumstances and I think I might have gotten a little better at my job as a result. I feel like I'm really behind in my life, but it's important to celebrate small victories like these. I'm curious to see how my performance improves as I put in more hours.
I'm also looking forward to getting all of my debts paid off--or at least paying off the ones that can be conceivably dealt with in a realistic time frame. My delinquent AT&T bill will be paid most likely by the 23rd, but my Walmart credit card bill will take more time. I'm separating that into payments of about $70 per month, although it's possible I"ll pay more on it sometimes if I find myself with some extra cash. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about my student loan payments. I don't have even the slightest inclination how I could fit that into my budget and still have enough money to buy food and pay for utilities. I am going to have to start doing that soon and I'm not really looking forward to it.
It's easy to dwell on the fact that at 26 I should be in a better financial situation than this. I should have graduated from college a long time ago instead of entering at age 23 and then dropping out a year later. I've always lacked direction and motivation in life and as a result my finances have suffered. There are things I want to do, of course, but I've never considered myself a very independent person. The biggest thing I've ever done alone is move to Texas, but I still had a lot of help from different people around me. My friends supported me enough to pack up all of my possessions in a tiny vehicle and drive me to Illinois so my roommate-to-be could pick me up and tow me all the way back to Austin. And then four months later when I found it wasn't working out, those same friends drove 1000 miles to pick me up. It was a silly and impulsive decision to make but my friends were there to bail me out.
In the end, though, it was a decision that I made on my own. My friend from Texas gave me the option and I could have easily said "No, I just don't think that sounds feasible. There are too many things that could go wrong." I could have said that and I would have been right. But I didn't. I said yes and then I tried to figure out a way to actually make it happen. We worked out something and a week or so later I was 1000 miles away. It was utterly surreal. It was one of those moments in my life where I'd wake up in the morning and I'd realize what I'd done--and I'd look at myself in the mirror. I'd say "Wow, I can't believe I actually did that." It was a ballsy move and I'm not known for ballsy moves. Even if it didn't work out in the end, I'm glad that I gave it a shot. I'm glad that I got to experience living somewhere else for awhile and I hope something like that will happen again. Next time I"ll be in a better place. I'll have money saved up, and I'll have the resources and skillset required to find a decent job in the area. And it'll be nice.
I'm going on tangents here, but that's okay. I haven't had an entry like this in awhile--one where I ramble and let the thread of my thoughts unravel wildly before me. These things have been on my mind lately. I'm getting older. I really wonder how things are going to progress for me. A couple of months before I moved to Texas, I wouldn't have dreamed I'd ever end up there. If someone had told me at that point that in two months I'd be 1000 miles away living in an apartment with someone I'd only ever known from the internet, then I'd ask them how they could predict the future. But then I'd say I didn't believe them unless they provided some pretty compelling contextual evidence to support their claims. Because y'know, I'm not completely unreasonable.
My point is--where am I going to be in two months? Am I still going to have this job? I hope so. I hope I will have morphed into a better salesman and that I will have a lot more confidence. I hope I'll be closer to having some debts paid off and I hope that I will have somehow found a way to forge some new relationships with people. What I don't want it to be is another Walmart situation. When I worked there every day was pretty much the same and nothing ever changed. It was like that for a long stretch of time. I worked there for four years and one day I just snapped to attention and I realized that I'd been working there for a good chunk of my 20s. All that time--and I'd spent it working at Walmart.
I mean, it wasn't all bad. A lot of cool stuff happened to me at Walmart and I'm really glad for that. I'm glad I was in a serious relationship even though it didn't end up working out. I still have those memories and I think it made me a better person overall. No matter what I've gone through since then, I can't dismiss what that did for me. There are of course things I regret about that period of my life, but that's fine, too. It's fine to have regrets as long as I don't let them consume me. It's all about looking to the future now.
But what's in the future for me? I don't know. I don't think I ever have. I've never even had the audacity to feel like I knew what was coming. I've had suspicions, of course, and I've had hopes. Most of my hopes didn't pan out, but I'm pretty okay with that. Things almost never go as we plan. It makes me wonder why people spend so much time doing it when things tend to fall apart, anyway. I think it's better to just have a general idea sometimes--but I guess that's why my life has historically been so directionless and why I dropped out of college after running out of general education classes to take.
I am not a man of many accomplishments. I think at one point in my life it seemed like I was going to be. I was obviously a very talented and intelligent kid. I was the kid with a lot of potential--and in a lot of ways that potential has been squandered, at least by the standards of most who would care to measure such a thing. For me, that doesn't matter all that much. It really only matters if I'm living up to my own expectations. I have goals and hopes for myself that don't align with what anyone else expects of me. When I was a kid I wanted to be a writer. At the time I felt that entailed fielding published works. But maybe that's not what it is. I think I'm a writer now. I am what I wanted to be. All those years of never writing--that's over. That's over for good now. In only a few months, I will have been doing this blog for an entire year.
That's an accomplishment I can be proud of.
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