Today was a tough one, for a bunch of reasons that I won’t go into, but the general feeling boiled down to: I am 24 years old and not even remotely independent, fiscally or otherwise. I think the thing I hadn’t really factored in when I came to the USA was that I’d need to drive to really get on my own two feet, and then this winter hit just as I was hitting my stride with that - a winter that’s created eight-foot snowbanks by the side of the road that still, unbelievably, do not deter Massachusetts drivers from behaving like god damn animals. I haven’t driven in at least three months. I can’t apply for jobs, because to do so would bring with it the assumption that I can get to those jobs, which I can’t right now.
And this is all sort-of, kind-of okay, because there are people who care about me and I’m not going to be thrown out on the street and in terms of the very bare essentials I am not in any immediate danger, but still. It wears on you. You try not to think in comparatives, but living in a different country brings with it a set of new variables that you can’t help but line up with how you lived before. The winter before I left, I was working. I still couldn’t drive. I took the bus, because that’s a thing you can do when you live in a country that doesn’t half-ass its public transport infrastructure.
This feeling flares up every now and then, usually with no apparent impetus, occasionally with something specific, like a general complaint about the cost of living from our grandparents (which my self-sabotaging brain interprets, without fail, as “you cost too much, get out”), or a night spent flicking through rental listings in Salem, or noting that there are people my age who are already enjoying ridiculous levels of success, because given a large enough sample size things like that do, predictably, happen.
I don’t know. This is really one long complaint, with no satisfying resolution. I still have someone with whom I am desperately in love, and that is enormously helpful and a light in the dark when I accidentally flick the switch. And I’m writing again - not just here, but fiction, strange and exciting and outright spooky stuff that will, at some point, see the light of day. And I’ll keep one eye firmly fixed outside, waiting for those snowbanks to melt.