Changes

The past three months have been tumultuous for me. I graduated college, I left my job, I’ve moved twice (once in town, and once to a different state). In general, I don’t do well with large changes.

After graduation, I felt lost without the rigorous scheduling that the school year provides. I had specific blocks of time where I could go get meals. I had a good idea of what I needed to do each day to move forward. After graduation, though, I didn’t have anything that I needed to manage, time-wise. I had cleaning to do, sure, but it didn’t have to fit in between homework and debate practice. I felt lost when my schedule went out the window.

Then, that happened a second time when I left my job. I went from having a set time commitment roughly five times per week to having no time commitments at all. And I know that it sounds like a good thing when I say it like that, like “I can sit at home and do whatever,” but there’s a problem. I’m restless without a schedule. I get cranky if I don’t do enough stuff each day, because I’m used to doing so much all the time. I’m hoping that finding even part time work will help with that (or maybe I’ll just set a strict schedule for writing about stuff, to start).

Moving has been really hard for me. For my junior and senior year, I lived in a house (a crappy, run-down, old house that I loved) with a group of my closest friends (shout out to the Prism crew). I had my room, with all my stuff in it (even if I did switch rooms partway through). It was down the street from a pizza place and a burrito place, and a block from my school. The living room is where we all played video games together, where we all watched movies and ate takeout (yes, living off campus is, in fact, every college stereotype). In the kitchen we had a board full of out-of-context quotes. It was my home, and I had to leave it. Upon moving out, two of our roommates went back to be with their parents, way out of town.

Then, I moved in with my partner, in a 2-bedroom apartment. It would have been a really nice place, I’m convinced, if we’d have stayed there long enough to unpack all our boxes. See, we were only there for two months–from when our leases ran out, to when L’s job commitment wrapped up. So, we had a bean-bag and a weird fold-up chair-like-thing that was about floor level, and we found this really low to the ground end table that we used to serve food on. It was full of boxes and clutter (neither of us owned a shelf large enough to matter), but I still lived in the same town as my best friend. We only saw each other once a week or so, instead of three times a day for several hours (living together has its perks), but he was still able to come over and watch Marco Polo with me. And then we moved again.

I cried. We said goodbye and hugged and I got in my car and cried. And then I went home and I cried. And then I tried to get some packing done and I found a picture he drew for me when I was mad at him (it’s a landscape of the farming village we made together in Minecraft) and I cried. And the next day we packed up and we drove across Massachusetts and unloaded the things we’d need for the first night, slept, and unloaded the rest of the U-Haul and, you guessed it, I cried.

I really wish I were better equipped to deal with these big life changes, but I really just want to reach a point where things are stable. I want to get a job so I can look for the apartment that I’ll be living in with L for the foreseeable future. I want to put down roots again. I’m getting used to my new surroundings, but it has not been an easy process for me, at all. I’m hoping with time I can learn the coping mechanisms I need to adjust to big life changes. I’m hoping it gets easier.

 

-Finn