Baditude

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned. It's been almost exactly one month since my last entry. Please forgive me while I talk about myself incessantly.

Let me level with y'all: I'm going through it. I'm moody. I'm quite lost. I'm overwhelmed at "adulting" or whatever it is that I am pretending to do right now. I've become particularly sassy. I've been failing on that whole "be more positive" macguffolution by instead being a total Debbie Downer. I'm perhaps even more introverted than I used to be and have become a borderline JD Salinger-style hermit (more on that in a future post). I'm not sticking with HMR. Instead, I'm sitting on the couch eating buttered noodles out of one bowl and shredded cheese out of another with two different spoons while preparing for the Gilmore Girls revival. Meanwhile, there are two huge boxes of food that could feed a large village in some third world country just sitting in our living room because we can't fit it in our pantry due to the other food we have yet to eat.

I'm, quite frankly, depressed - partially for reasons that I cannot reasonably discuss in public without being wholly disowned by my family, and partially for reasons that I am happy to discuss. It's taken a while for me to admit it, but I think that denial been causing more damage than good. I know why I'm depressed. I'm dealing with it, kind of. No, I'm not being emotionally, physically, domestically, or internationally abused. But I am going through something very personal. This blog, of course, seems like it would be the perfect outlet for dealing with it outwardly, but for the sake of the privacy of those involved and a whole slew of other bizarro Lifetime Movie reasons, I am choosing to not publicly elaborate at this time.

The truth is, I'm in a funk. I've got a baditude. I am a hot mess. 

I used to be an optimist. I used to think that people always had the best intentions. I used to believe that people would follow through. I used to think that karma was faster at serving of a fresh plate of REALLY BAD DEROGATORY NAME FOR A FEMALE CANINE to bad people who did bad things to good people. I used to think that people put other people's needs above their own. I used to try to find the kindness in others instead of just picking out the bad parts (or, at least, the parts I deem as unsavory). I have lost my patience for others. I've forgotten how to immediately see the good in people.

Maybe it's the result of the transition from academia to Corporate America. I went from a bright eyed and bushy-tailed snowflake out to change the world to figuring out that I am just one clump of frozen water in a blizzard of other clumps of frozen water. I'm a cog in the machine. I'm not really changing much of anything - at least, not how I thought I would be. I thought that my life was buffering in grad school and that, once it was over, I'd be good to go. Press play. No commercial interruptions. Yes, Netflix, I am still watching and no, I am not "chilling" - but thank you for asking.

But here I am in the real world and I'm still...buffering.

Unfortunately, Craig - also known as "the Best Thing to Ever Happen Ever" - has to deal with the brunt of it, because I can't be a complete disaster of a person to people who didn't enter into a lifelong/legal/spiritual contract with me. That's a pretty bad excuse, I guess. Luckily, he's patient. I'm grateful for that. But he shouldn't have to always be patient, and I shouldn't always be the basket case.

I know this is all part of the quarter-life crisis, a term some other snowflake of a millennial came up with when they "just couldn't deal" with the fact that, honestly, the real world is hard. The real world does not change just because we tell it to. The real world has bills - I had no idea I could owe that much many to that many people without it being a mob deal. Cable is EXPENSIVE. My knees hurt for no reason beyond walking on them. The real world DOES NOT care about your degree or resume. The real world is full of choices - many of which are not immediately apparent. The real world has real consequences. The real world is, frankly, ~real~.

If you've made it this far without dusting off that old Evanescence album, I think you can probably relate. The sad truth is that we may not be able change the world in the sweeping way we may have originally envisioned. But that doesn't mean we can't change it at all.

This blog is all about reinvention and intervention (for those of you who hadn't caught on yet), and I've done quite a bit of the former. I think it's time for the latter. I've always used writing has an escape, but I think it's time to use it for the exact opposite. So, I am going to face what's been weighing me down emotionally and making me just a delight to be around by writing it all down. No, it won't be published here. It may never be published at all. But at least I'll get it out into the universe somewhere, even if it's just on paper. Some people might call this journaling, and I suppose that is what it is, but I'm going to think of it as super inexpensive therapy. 

After all, change begins with you. If you can't change something, change your baditude. You have to be the change you want to see in the world...or whatever. Cliches are gross, but I have to get it together before I hit my midlife crisis and buy myself a Tuscan villa with my Chase card.

But it's a start, right? Right.