This project is due Monday, and I have another three million years of transcriptions to do. And I can’t get my head in the game. Fuck. Maybe it’s because I’m tired, but that can’t be true, because I have no real reason to be tired, as I’ve been getting more than enough sleep. Or maybe it’s because I have ADD and my meds have worn off by now. Or maybe I’m having some sort of existential, twentysomething crisis. That seems to be happening a lot lately. 

I just want my real life to begin. Maybe that’s the root of the problem— I’m impatient and unsatisfied. I’ve been in college for what feels like forever, and I know I only have a year left, but my motivation was gone at the beginning of this semester. And I keep having these flashes of anger and what feels like petulance at my current circumstances, because I want my life to begin. Everything’s been so stable, but I still feel like I’m in arrested development, and I keep finding myself wondering what my life would be like if it went any number of different ways. 

What would my life be like if I was still at Mills? Would I ever have been happy there, wondering why I had to get depression and fuck up my relationships? I keep seeing my time at Mills through these rosy graduation goggles, which is not what it was actually like at all, but there’s a big part of me that misses it. I miss being on my own. I miss keeping my own schedule and doing my own thing and buying my own groceries and chain smoking on the hill that had the view of the bay bridge. I miss getting up at three in the morning because I couldn’t sleep, and going outside to walk through the campus when it was absolutely still. I miss my photography projects, and all the time I got to spend alone, working in a studio with film and paper and chemicals. And I miss my photography classmates, and all the time that we spent together in that darkroom, blasting music and getting angsty over our concepts and our exposures. I miss that independence. 

But I’m happy here, and I’m happy at home, and I’m in love with my best friend. My life is wonderful, and I’m so thankful for it, but I keep having that familiar fear that this is all that there will ever be. I’ve fallen out of contact with my best friend, another of my good friends isn’t replying to my messages for no conceivable reason, and I work most weekends so when people are going out, I’m in a restaurant. And I make very little effort to make real friends because I assume that they won’t actually like me. I assume that I’ll drive them away somehow, which I guess is nonsensical, but really makes a difference to me. 

And I get these aches, and spend too much time wondering what my life would be like if it were different. I ache because my former classmates are reproducing and getting married, and I ache because they go out to bars with each other and party and have groups of “the girls” and I’ve never really had much of a group. I did briefly, but I fucked it up, and I guess I just feel like a wallflower. But really I adore Jordan and my family and am thrilled to be so near all of them, so I feel kind of idiotic complaining about my slight dearth of friends. Especially since it’s a problem that I could easily fix. 

I guess I’m happy, but I feel stuck.