State of Me

[cinaed]

tl;dr – I am turning thirty next Sunday and been having a months-long freak-out over it. And haven't really written anything since May, so there's that too.

So I am turning 30 on Sunday, August 7, and it's been freaking me out in both minor and major ways. Minor, in that “oh no, now my mother's REALLY going to start going overboard trying to get me dating” way (I expect to find myself involuntarily signed up for eHarmony by her any day now). Major, in that “This is in some ways where I want to be in life and in other ways NOT AT ALL” panicky way.

---

 

I've never really thought too far ahead in life, my whole twenties was a series of “I'm pretty miserable, how do I get less miserable” adventures, but when I did, I imagined myself with a semi-successful writing career, a job I love, an apartment to myself, and one or two cats. Well, one out of four is...okay, I guess!

Under my real name, I do have two things published, but it's like in 2009 my brain took “Hey, you're published!” as “Hey, this is a fluke and you're never going to write anything decent that's original again.” I've managed to write and finish one short story last year, and got an encouraging rejection letter for it, but otherwise I haven't really done anything original since 2009. Not exactly a promising writing career. And since May I’ve been feeling guilty about that, so it’s made it impossible to work on either original fiction or fic, so I haven’t really been writing.

I do love my job. I love doing story time and watching the kids get super invested in singing “If You're Happy and You Know It” and yelling excited answers to a question I've posed about a book I'm reading. I love helping kids find the right book, and helping three of my regular preteens have their own summer reading club (so far they've read Maniac McGee, The Red Pencil, and The Might Miss Malone). I love sitting in the kids area and letting a kid tell me all about a book he's reading. (I have one kid who spent a half-hour Monday showing me all these robots, Tuesday all about animals, and Wednesday all about dinosaurs.)

But I also work in an urban city, and there's funding issues on top of teens being nasty and difficult to reason with. This week we had to call the cops in to escort thirty teens out after they were loud and cursing and verbally abusive to myself and other staff. The number of teens was new, but the situation is a regular one, and it's wearying. I told myself I'd work in the city for 4-5 years and then look elsewhere, but it's been three I'm already tired. And they're transferring back to our branch a former coworker who's so mean and unprofessional two of our other coworkers filed complaints against her, so once she's back, that's going to be, uh, fun.

I actually just submitted a job application for a children's librarian position closer to my family in Virginia, so fingers crossed about that!

I don't have my own place or cats. My two housemates are nice enough, but they both have habits that drive me up the wall, including not being very careful with the energy bill and constantly leaving lights on all through the house. We share the utility bills so I'm constantly gritting my teeth. The other one keeps throwing away my still-good fruits in my counter space, for no reasons that I can see. (Two still-green bananas, lost to the trash just last week, man.) I'd just...really love my own place where my books can be on actual bookshelves instead of in boxes under my bed. And a cat, man, I would give anything for a cat.

If I can get the job near my mom, there's a possibility of the county assisting me with buying an apartment or condo after a year, though I need to do more research about that, but right now I'm stuck in a small room that currently looks like a disaster since I'm in the middle of mercilessly weeding my entire media collection.

I just. I don't know. I just keep looking at my life and while there are things I like about it, there's so many things I don't. And I'm nowhere near where I want to be in life, and it's difficult to see how to change that. But I took a whole week off for my birthday (the 7^th all the way through to 15^th), so maybe I can figure stuff out then.