Just Trying

A couple of weeks ago, while I was on vacation in Oregon, I came across this fairly new country song while listening to Spotify one night called "Little Red Wine" by Tyler Braden. Within the first few seconds of hearing the song, I already knew that I was in love with it... and the nine thousand times I've listened to it since then have confirmed this. However, I'm in love with this song not because I like red wine (because for the record, I actually hate wine. Wait, am I even a real girl?) but rather because for some reason, a lot of the song kind of spoke to me --- especially the opening stanza --- and the other parts of the song were appealing just because I'm a stupid hopeless romantic. In the opening lines of the song, he sings:

You've been working that dead-end job from nine to five, Struggling from week to week to get the bills paid on time.

Sometimes it's a little too hard just to drink it off at night; The beer just won't cut it and the liquor's a little much; you need something just right.

For the past four and a half months, I felt exactly like this: I felt like I was working a dead-end nine (well, technically eight-thiry, but whatever) to five job. I really did feel like I was struggling from week to week to get my bills paid on time, but just to be clear, I never considered "drinking it off at night" though (I learned a long time ago that drinking away the pain is NEVER a good solution). Yes, it's very true that these bills aren't "real adult" bills yet; I still live with my parents and drive their car, so that knocks out rent, groceries, and car insurance. However, that doesn't mean that I wasn't still struggling --- and continue to struggle for that matter --- to pay my bills: the gas for the car, a monthly bed payment (when I bought the bed --- a FULL after sleeping in a twin for my entire life --- roughly three months ago, I couldn't pay for it all up front, so I opted to pay for it monthly), my credit card monthly payment, and allllllllll of my student loan monthly payments (student loans that add up to well over one hundred grand... yup) that recently kicked in and have been tapping on my shoulder seemingly every second of every single day whisper-screaming, "You're screwedddddddd!" in my ear.

These four "bills" alone have been a huge wake up call that being an adult is really freaking hard. For this reason, I recently bought myself socks from sockdrawer.com (my favorite sock website; I highly recommend checking it out!) that say "Adult In Training" on them). While these socks are pretty funny, there's a whole lot of serious to them, because I really have no h*ckin' clue how to be a real adult, and right now I'm very convinced that I'll be "in training" for quite some time. The term "monthly payment" alone now makes me flinch, so how the heck am I supposed to handle it when even more adult responsibilities are put on my plate? I don't know... I guess all of this is crazy-ness to me, because back in January, this was nowhere near the plan that I had for myself. Back in January, I applied for about fifty law office positions on Indeed.com and jumped at the first opportunity that was offered to me; I took a job as a receptionist/partial assistant in a law office about forty minutes from my house because for the past three years, I had this huge on-again/off-again dream of going to law school. Last summer, I even started telling everyone that I was finally going to start putting that plan into action. After I graduated from undergrad in December, I started taking all the right steps: I took the LSAT (the Law School Admission Test, aka truly I think the hardest academic test I've ever taken in my life) twice, signed up for the LSAC (Law School Admission Committee) website, asked two of my professional references to write me Letters of Recommendation, and even started to think about what I was going to write about for my Admission Essay. I signed up for and started taking Paralegal classes online, because I thought that having my Paralegal Certificate would be beneficial for me as I tackled law school.

But two months into the law office job and Paralegal classes, I cracked, and the reality of it all hit me like a truck. I was kind of killing myself trying to work full-time and technically be a "full-time" student. I was constantly falling asleep doing my homework or trying to complete my readings, and this was only two months into it. If I couldn't even handle it two months into it, how the heck was I supposed to handle it for the next two YEARS (because getting my Paralegal Certificate, aka an Associates degree in Paralegal Studies, would have taken this long)? And so I dropped the classes and ultimately decided to stop pursuing the Paralegal Certificate. The other problem was much bigger than simply deciding not to take classes to get an Associates degree: I didn't like the way being in a law-based environment was making me feel. It was making me sad and pissed off --- even more so than I already had been --- all the time. It was making me feel incompetent and like I could never do anything right or like I was never going to be good enough. It was making me feel dumb. Stupid. Idiotic. I was the youngest one in the office by about twenty years, and therefore I was the least experienced and apparently the biggest idiot.

I was WELL aware that an entry-level law office position was going to be exactly like this; I knew going into it that I would have so SO much to learn (but I was eager to learn as much as I could!). However, I wasn't prepared for all the crappy feelings that came along with it. I wasn't prepared for coworkers that were less than understanding of my just-out-of-college-ness, ones that made me feel like a burden for asking questions or not knowing how to do something. I wasn't prepared to "take work home with me," that is, to come home after work still upset and stressed out, even though I wasn't at work anymore. I wasn't prepared for work to make me want to immediately go to my room after getting home instead of talking to and spending time with my family, sometimes the only people who had the power to turn my mood around and make me feel better ("I can tell by the sound of your voice saying baby I'm home/ Just the tone and the slamming of the door that you need to be alone"). Put simply, I wasn't anywhere NEAR prepared for work making my life worse, not better. It hurts my heart and my brain to think that after just two months working at a law office, I let the law school dream fade away. I told myself that I was there for the "real world" experience; I told myself that after a year, I could leave and find a different job, one that I actually wanted to do instead of one that I felt like I had to do... but that in and of itself was yet another problem, because as the next couple of months went on, I kept feeling shittier and shittier about myself. I kept trying to put on a brave face and pretend that I was happy even though I wasn't; I kept trying to post happy, "look at how much fun I'm having!" pictures on my Instagram (i.e. ones exactly like the picture on this blog post) as a way to prove to people that my life was FUN and GREAT. I kept trying to act like I was fine... but the pictures were big lies, and the attempted brave faces were even bigger lies. The simple truth was that I HATED how work was making me feel --- I wasn't happy --- and finally, at the end of July, I couldn't take it anymore; I put in my two weeks (planned perfectly, because the day after my last day of working there, I was leaving for vacation to Oregon), explaining to my boss that I was feeling lost in life and trying to figure it all out but that working there wasn't my end goal. I strategically left out the parts about how working there was destroying any ounce of good mood that I ever tried to have, and I left out the part that I couldn't work there anymore because I didn't want to cry almost every day because of it (a job wasn't supposed to make one feel like this, after all). And so. Here I am, trying not to be too upset about being basically back to square one. Here I am, trying to be the best waitress I can until I figure out what I want to do with my life.

Here I am, trying like HECK to not act so lost, even though I feel so lost and confused that it almost makes me nauseous. Here I am, trying to not cry about the uncertainty of everything in my life right now. Here I am, just trying... and right now, I have to be okay with that. xoxo, Mag