When things get bad, the last thing I really want to do is talk about how much things suck. Partially this is because when I start doing that, out loud, to other people, I become aware of all the things I should be grateful for and the thousand ways it could get worse.
I’m also big on writing for the sake of catharsis. As such, this blog became kind of weird this week. I often say that this blog is more for my own benefit than anybody else’s, but that is exceptionally true of this week’s posts. It was me trying to give myself a pep talk. “Maybe if I talk about how capable I suddenly think I am, I will really believe it.”
Or muddle through.
Not that I would ever publicly admit to this as it was happening, but no, things aren’t fetal-position-in-bed bad right now. Even as I am making fun of myself for my personal-pep-talk approach to blogging, I can’t even say that things are currently a kind of bad that I can’t handle.
Now. Because I did. Because I am handling.
Having a blog has given me a false sense of my openness. I’m not sure when this happened, because I used to have the self-awareness to recognize that I’m kind of a private person. But the more I put things on the internet, the more I started feeling like this giant open book. That’s not entirely true. I still have a ridiculously intricate private life that I share either incredibly selectively or not at all.
Even here, I share the details of outlandish stories, but I am cryptic and often willfully misleading when I’m talking about bigger things. This is particularly true of things that scare me, as exemplified by my two previous posts this week.
Someone (being vague about specific people so as not to reveal who they are is a different thing entirely from being vague about my shit) recently told me that I am emotionally transparent, but she doesn’t know very much about me. That is, I don’t give her many specifics, but my lack of an emotional poker face always gives my feelings away. She knows when I’m stressed/sad/giddy/etc. I wear my feelings on my face and in the way I carry myself.
Another someone, to whom she was comparing me, told her all sorts of things about her life, but was so steady and calm that it was hard to get an emotional read. Still, this Main Someone feels she knows a great deal more about this Secondary Someone than she does about me, because of my refusal to discuss things.
There are a lot of reasons I do this, ranging from the one that started this post, to self-preservation, to my wish to keep other people from feeling in any way put out by my problems. I’m going to stop myself now because I’m doing it again: I’m conceptually talking around the details. (I also just enjoy doing that, which is another, less deliberate reason the specifics get glossed over.)
I’m going to make my friend from Monday seem even less like an actual person and more like a figment of my bloggy imagination so let me preface this with: FOR REAL FOR REAL SHE EXISTS.
Her status update, coupled with all my catharsis writing, finally made me commit to my “claw your way out of this hole” decision. It was one that I struggled with immensely, but had to make. I quit my job on Monday.
The aforementioned Main Someone put this problem quite nicely: The least desirable option is the easiest and clearest. When you stop juggling things to make the other options work, the decision becomes obvious.
I have an amazing boss and the work is interesting, but it doesn’t pay very well and I need a second job to live here on that. Plain and simple. I have the utmost faith that the future inhabitant of my job will make more than I do in the not-too-distant future. I just don’t have the luxury of riding it out. Why? My thesis.
I have this pesky thesis that has just become the dark cloud that hangs over me and I can’t go from a full day of work to getting in the right frame of mind to do any productive thesis work. Thus, I have only the weekends, in a world where I have no weekends. It’s not going anywhere and this has gotten out of hand.
When I came home from Paris, the plan was to use the prospect of leaving Missouri as the fire under my ass to motivate me to finish it. But then I cheated. I got a job and I bailed in October and the thesis was abandoned. I can’t let it stay that way. The other members of my cohort are all done with the program. I am the last one left and I hate it. I hate that I am not done yet. It’s pathetic and embarrassing.
This whole thing is, actually, embarrassing. It’s not fun for me to tell anyone, let alone everyone about this. Having conversations about my on-going failures sucks, but there it is. I’ve outed myself. Mostly.