I had this whole thing going about sharing all the stuff and being less guarded and more willing to own my shame and all that good stuff, but I realized, even at the time, that I couldn’t get all that into one post that was any reasonable length.

So yeah, there’s a bit more. And there will be a lot more after this, because of the aforementioned issues with that inner life that I share with nobody. I’m also going against my whole “I need to stop talking around allthethings” policy because transition phases require a lot of this big life conceptualizing crap and we’re all just going to have to deal with it. By which I mostly mean myself. I am just going to have to deal with it.

When breaking all of this down with my friends, I explained that I probably shouldn’t have taken the job in the first place. Not only did I cheat on my thesis plan, but I also took it with a horribly naive understanding of what my cost of living was really going to be out here. That’s the rest of my big shame: I had no fucking clue how to manage my finances. I’m going home, in no small part, because I’m tired of being perpetually broke.

It’s not even that I wasn’t warned. I was. I was warned. I knew it would be like this. Yet I did nothing about it, because of all the I’M GOING TO DO THIS THING hubris I had going on at the time.

To past!me’s credit: I originally applied for an internship. I applied for a part-time location independent internship with a viable possibility of employment at the end. That, to me, was perfect. Work 10-ish hours a week from home sucking up to a potential employer, while still getting my thesis done in a timely fashion.

PERFECT. The plan was perfect. I was in town visiting my best friend and celebrating her engagement. I could interview for the position without even mentioning my not-living-in-LA thing. My family never changed our San Fernando Valley phone numbers when we moved away over a decade ago. In retrospect, I wish I’d been more forthcoming about that. It’s one of many things I would do differently.

I interviewed and she was lovely, and she was so interested in my thesis, and we got along really well. She asked if I would be interested in the job instead of the internship. And my reaction was, “JOB? I HEAR THOSE ARE GOOD TO HAVE!”

Whenever I am in LA, I never want to leave. Driving away from here is always a painful thing for me because it’s home. (More on this another day, because, you know, feelings forever.) Planning her engagement party under the parameters of my limited time in town was an absolute pain and I couldn’t pass on the prospect of (1) finally making good on my past!self’s promise to return to LA -and- (2) being here for all the wedding excitement.

Then reality sunk in. When I first got here it was simple enough. I had a good thing worked out with said best friend. I slept in her living room and paid minimal rent. It’s the sort of arrangement that requires a very particular relationship, but we have it.

I had to get a second job as soon as I got here, though, because at the time, the main job was part-time. In my head, I really believed that I was going to work on my thesis in my spare time. I thought I was going to work that out. I lasted a few months at that job before I quit, less because of my thesis and more because I deeply hated it. Also, being a bridesmaid is surprisingly time-consuming. Not in a bad way — I loved every single step of that process — but, you know, my best friend was getting married and I wanted to be as much a part of that as possible.

Over Christmas my dad made a comment about my lack of financial wiggle room (when I still had both jobs). As far as I was concerned, I was doing fine. But he rightly pointed out that if something serious happened — car problems, for example — I didn’t have the flexibility to deal with that. These are the kinds of things that hadn’t actually occurred to me, because I am not an actual grown-up.

Part of what broke me in the end was the realization that I also lacked emotional wiggle room. When my grandfather died, I realized how thinly spread I was in every possible way. I had about two weeks between when I quit my second job and when my main job became full time. Those two weeks being the two weeks before the wedding, for which I was a maid of honor, and the two weeks in which my grandfather died, it didn’t feel like much in the way of part-time. I have no idea how I thought I was going to write a thesis while working full time, but I really believed that I would.

In facts-related-to-my-lack-of-emotional-wiggle-room: I stayed in my grandparent’s hotel room the weekend before I quit and I realized it was the second night all year that I had slept in an actual bedroom all by myself. As an introverted person, I’m pretty sure this explains a lot of my sanity struggles.

I made a crap decision when I took the job. I’m glad that I got to be here for certain things, learning is good, regret is a waste of time — all of that. There’s a lot of good that came out of my bad decision and I don’t want to belittle that. But the basic point is that I should not have made it. I made a bad decision and I’m owning that.

A friend far wiser than myself pointed out that it’s pointless to own that I made a mistake and do nothing to course correct. So this is what I’m doing. I am acknowledging how horrible my judgment was and trying to fix it.

Part of me questions the quality of my judgment in putting this out on the internet, but most of me feels like my deliberate withholding of information consistently did more harm than good. If it’s here, on a space so closely tied to me, I can’t hide from it or pretend I didn’t fuck up. That’s another important part of owning that you made a mistake: you know, actually owning it.