Char: ...Now What?

As I slowly start to separate myself and withdraw from the fierce pride that is Penn State and State College, I'm feeling incredibly challenged about where my identity with find it's strength next. If background is necessary, at the end of August, I completed by fixed-term position with Penn State Orientation, and, as planned, moved down with SB and Peanut. A few days after I got here, we jumped on a plane and went to Seattle and SF for a week, WHERE I SAW AL FOR THREE WHOLE HOURS. IT WAS GLORIOUS. GLO.RI.OUS. GLORIOUS. She looks spectacular by the way. SO much happier from the last time I saw her (three years ago?)

Every time I go back to SF, I think about how easy it would be to just drop things here and go back there. To a place where I don't have to pay any attention to social norms, where there are Safeways and Mexican Restaurants and humidity isn't a thing and most of my people. While visiting is wonderful, it always makes me sad. There are, of course, some things that I do, or have become, on the east coast, that would be hard to bring back to California. One of the greatest parts about moving was that when SB and I met people here, they accepted us for however we presented ourselves. It gave us room to grow, and for the first time in two years, we weren't around people who assumed they knew us together better than we knew ourselves. Moving gave us room to grow into our own as a couple. We also, of course, got little Peanut out of it, and I have an amazing State College Family that I miss every single day.

I wonder if thinking of it as a bookended experience is part of what's throwing me off so much. Because really, its not a bookended experience, it's my life. And now my life has moved, and I' still not in California. I go back and forth between asking myself really big, hard, scary questions, and trying to pair down and ask myself what I'm going to do in the next 30 minutes to try to make everything more manageable. I don't know the best way to do it. Maybe this is the best way to do it. Think big, work small.

I feel lost and numb, but at the same time content. There are things that my friends are doing (travelling the world, going out all the time, having babies) and I don't want any of those things yet. I just have to figure out what I do want.

I heard a really interesting TED talk on one of my drives down here in the past few months. It was about parenting. The speaker talked about how silly he thought it was that so many parents just want their children to "be happy" in life. He said, drug addicts can be happy, people breaking the law can be happy with themselves. Is that really what we mean? I've always said, that in life, I just want to be happy. But I'd rather be determined, accomplished, driven, experimental, and lots of other things- that produce many outcomes, one of which may (and should) be joy and happiness. So that's what I'm aiming for. We can't always like everything we're doing all the time. But we can do exciting scary things that result in happiness, so that's what I'm going to try to do for the next few months.

Enough for now.
Char