Transitions

I haven't posted in a while for two reasons. The first is that I moved into my new (to me) apartment a week ago and we haven't even called to set up our internet yet. So I'm not sure when I'll get it at home and for now I've only been checking my email and whatever else is important at school. So, I'd like to say that I haven't written because I just don't have access and I'm too busy... but I guess I've deliberately been avoiding it. I've been keeping myself from posting because the only things I can think about writing that have been on my mind are negative things. School is not the greatest, work is uneventful, my living situation... well, I've been avoiding being there as much as possible, so that doesn't leave a whole lot of positive things to write.

I'll give a brief recap of what life has been like in the last few weeks. I moved in last week and because it was 85 degrees and sunny, I didn't bring any warm clothes with me. I should have been smarter and thought more about the transitioning time between seasons in the midwest, since I've lived here a long time. The next couple days that I was living in River Falls were cold; one day was 58 and rainy. Sometimes I forget that it can be like 80 in the morning when I'm walking to class and then 60 when I'm walking home from class that same day (which would be an example of today and why I'm avoiding going home right now... wearing a skirt and flip flops... I need a jacket!). The move sucked, but I was thankful to have help from my former roommate and her husband. I don't know how else I would have gotten my furniture all the way to this state. But you would think that after all the moving I've done in the last few years (from home to school to camp to BC to home to Wisconsin to West Virginia to home to here) that I would be a lot better at packing and being organized. Unfortunately I'm not, and even though I've been living here for a week, all of my things are still strewn about in my room - half of it in plastic shopping bags and half just individually dropped on my floor. It's a mess.

So now I've been in this process of transitioning and I hate it. I love change, and I love experiencing new places and people, but I hate the transitioning period more so now than ever. I hate being back in the same city and with the same roommates and in classes with the same professors and people, yet feeling like I am completely different and knowing what I wanted for my life a year ago is completely different now. And when I think about it, from year to year this always seems to happen everywhere I go - this realization after a while that I want something else - but this is the first year that I've gone back to the same school in the fall that I went to the previous year since I was in 11th grade. So it's really strange to go on with my life here like I did last year, and not really wanting to. Before school started I felt like my life had been on hold since I had been home. I was waiting to move back to school and start work again. But at the same time, so much has been changing lately in what I thought was in store for my future and what I thought I wanted, so it's just been kind of confusing.

What's more is that being in River Falls makes me feel incredibly lonely. It's a feeling that I'm not really used to... I like being surrounded by people or at least having one person close to me that I can see regularly. And even though I already know people here (as opposed to my experience last fall or the years before that) I don't have a person like that and I don't really know how to deal with it. I go to my room in my apartment and just feel so alone. There are plenty of things to do to keep me occupied, but I always just end up sitting and thinking about how I feel like everyone close to me is so far away. And even though I've moved a lot further away before, right now this is a huge transition for me. Even though I'm supposedly surrounded by all that's familiar here, I am horribly uncomfortable everywhere. I want to go back to feeling like I'm a part of a group that cares... but right now I just can't.

That's what makes it hard to be in school. I have little motivation to finish when I think about the fact that I could take off and move across the world right now and be working with people and enjoy it and I wouldn't really need this degree to do that. But I keep reminding myself that it will be useful in the end.

This is a little update on what's been on my mind lately. There's so much more that I could write but even though this is my blog and I control what should and shouldn't be said, I still feel like I never know how personal I should be... like Lynnea says, I have no idea who could be reading this (it's not a secret anymore...)! But it doesn't really matter because anyone who's really in touch with me knows everything going on in my life, anyway. And right now I just need to get home and into warm clothes.