So, do you have a boyfriend?
My stepbrother’s wife.
Holy fuck. This is one of several relatives to ask me this in the last week. It’s like I’ve walked into a goddamn romantic comedy that should be starring Katherine Heigl or that girl Justin Long falls for in He’s Just Not That Into You. Like, when she (Katherine or what’s-her-face) is at some family function and her ancient great-aunt-so-and-so asks if she’s married and she has to say no, she’s currently single, and you’re supposed to feel all sad for her because oh my god she’s twenty-four and she doesn’t have a diamond yet? Spinster!
Except this is entirely different, for a few reasons:
I mean, Christ. I am a freshman in college. Ask me about that. Ask me what books I’ve read recently, ask me about my non-existent job, my future, my friends, my car, my pretty new shoes (Doc Marten’s, of course!!), my cat, anything under the fucking sun, I don’t care, just have a conversation with me that does not begin with “So, do you have a boyfriend yet?” and end with “Oh, well, the right man will come along someday, I’m sure.”
Huff.
And yeah, okay, fine, I’ll admit that maybe a little of this is that I don’t have a boyfriend. In fact, I’ve never had a boyfriend. But you know what? I am my own fucking person, and my lack of a boyfriend is but a small fraction of who I am.
I am intelligent and sarcastic and funny and yeah, okay, awkward. I’m crazy and fun and I talk too much and sometimes I have insane bursts of energy that fizzle out quickly. I’m a photographer, a book worm, a student, an aspiring lawyer-ish-person-maybe. I am a feminist. I am in love with music and have some really goddamn weird tastes in bands. I love driving. I like wearing hand-me-downs from my brother and combat boots and lime green jackets and big comfy flannels. Yes, I bake and I crochet and I want to learn to sew, but that’s not because I’m trying to be fucking June Cleaver or some shit, it’s because I think it’s awesome to be able to say you personally made something kick-ass. I have so much more to me than whether or not I have a boyfriend.
So why is that the only thing anyone seems to care about?
(Source: apriki)
Seriously. Like, I love the music I’m listening to, so why the fuck am I so worried about the fact that the people in the hallway and in the rooms around me can probably hear it?
Ugh. I wish I didn’t care. But I do.
I care too much
and I try too hard
and it gets me shit in the end.
I mean like, I think clarity in written language is valuable, but debating the oxford comma is one of those things that reminds me that we’re all gonna die and that our lives are composed of like a finite set of moments that we choose how to spend. And I can’t help but think that if we turn the massive parallel processing power of our brains away from debating the oxford comma and toward, like, curing malaria or writing really good Arrested Development slash fiction, we might come out ahead as a species.
I’m changing my major to Law & Society with a minor in Women’s Studies and a potential double major in Psychology.
I know I said I was cool with being directionless, and I am. But this just feels right.
Not five minutes from now, not five days from now, not five weeks or months or years from now.
And the more I think about it, the more okay with it I become. I’m eighteen; I’m young, I’m stupid, and I have no future. And it’s glorious, really.
Dear god.
Seriously though, this whole “Hey, I know it’s been my life plan for a couple years now and all, but I can’t be a Social Worker” thing is sorta freaking me out. I mean, I was like really proud of myself for having the entire decade after high school graduation planned out: four years in college in an accredited social work program (resulting in my diploma and a social work certification), a year to get my master’s, and then two years working for a government agency before getting a job as a high school social worker. Where I would probably stay for a very long time. So actually, I’d planned more than a decade. I planned basically my adult life, as far as career is concerned.
And now I’m like… wait no, you idiot. You forgot to account for your own mental stability.
Oh. Right. That might help.
So now I’m looking at what else I might do with my life, since destroying myself does not seem like the best idea, and I’m thinking, You know what? Fuck it. I’m going to become a fuckin lawyer. I like law, I’m fucking intelligent as hell (if I do say so myself…:D) and I can still help people, but not in a setting that’s going to, you know, kill me.
So I’m probably changing my major to Law & Society and minoring in Women’s Studies. I’m going to think about it more, but I’m fairly sure it’s what I want to do. Which is a weird concept, for sure. But I can still do everything I wanted to, just in a more personal-mental-health-friendly way.
One of the few things still left intact from this summer is my friendship with one of the few girl Creatures (my “term of endearment” for all the skater kids/townies from home) that didn’t hate me. She’s a sophomore this year, so since Kristen and I were around all summer, we sort of took her in as one of us. There were drama issues, of course, but that’s any girl friendship. She’s fucked up in a lot of ways and just needs some help. We’re not super close (she’s closer with Kristen, because I think Kristen wanted to be friends with her since I would be leaving at the end of the summer) but we still talk, and she’s one of the various lost puppies that I seem to collect - I always want to help people to the point that it winds up hurting me, so my mom started calling it Lost Puppy Syndrome, and so now I refer to those people as my lost puppies. Pathetic, I know.
Last Friday, she got kicked out of her house. She didn’t sleep Friday night - she wandered the streets with another boy from home who’s currently homeless. She stayed at her boyfriend’s house last night, and she’ll be with a friend tonight and has plans to stay with other people until Wednesday night, when she’s no idea what she’s doing or where she’s staying. She said there’s an empty mausoleum in a cemetery in town that she might be able to stay in, horrifyingly enough. So yeah, she’s a very lost puppy right now.
I can’t take care of her, obviously. She cannot live on the floor of my dorm room. I can’t figure out a way to get her to school every day. She is not my responsibility. In addition to that, I don’t trust her - she will screw up relationships for me, interfere with a lot of different things, steal god-knows-what (Adderall gets about $5 a pill, so I’m sure she’d go after that) and just generally Fuck Shit Up.
And yet…
I can’t help it - she’s in trouble, and she’s my friend. So of course I’m trying to figure out what I can do for her, how I can help her without it hurting me. But I really can’t think of anything, which is killing me. Of course, there’s Kristen, who could be helping her out, but it doesn’t sound like she is. She doesn’t want to move back home, but she’s too young to be legally emancipated, so if anyone from the school finds out, she’ll either be forced to move back home or forced to move to Tennessee with her father, which she does not want to do. She’s stuck.
I know I can’t help her except to be a friend, to listen when she needs to talk and offer suggestions when and where I can. It’s just painful for me to be so powerless.
And this is where I have to stop and think about this situation and realize that if I’m sitting here, well aware that I can’t do anything and feeling so distressed over it, how am I going to be able to cope as a social worker? To be completely honest, there’s just no way. I can’t do it. I’ve had this realization before, and I’ve pushed it aside, but now that I really examine it, I just can’t. This is not where my life should be headed because it will more than likely be the death of me, though whether I’m speaking emotionally or physically I don’t know. I’ve wanted to be a school social worker for the longest time, but it’s insanity - logically, I will be able to help perhaps a small percentage of the kids that will go through my office, but I’m an idealist and will think that I’ll be able to save them all and when the crushing reality of the situation - that I’m really pretty powerless, that there are countless lost puppies and so few that can be helped, let alone saved - sets in, it’s going to fuck me up irreparably.
I need to change paths now. I know I do. But to what?
