February - Ostrich Time

I guess first I should apologize to my readers for going a bit MIA.  My goal had been to blog two-three times a week but we can see already in month one I have failed that.  Oopsie.  Sorry.  February has been a weird month.  Work was turned a bit on its head with the whole office move and then there was no work for me, so I had to shift and doing work for our Dallas office, and then we had (for those of you who have been living under a rock and have missed it) two weeks of snow storms/blizzards/being generally smacked around by Old Man Winter in the form of - pick your favorite - Snowpocalpyse, Snowmagadden, SnOMG, Snoverkill, or Snotorious b.I.g.  Its been nuts.


All this snow, and the accompanying "snow days" (who doesn't love getting paid to not go to work and to stay home?) has given me some time to reflect. Or not reflect.  Or reflect and then get freaked out by all the reflecting I was doing and hide in the depths of the sanctuary that is HGTV "House Hunters".  Guess which one I picked?  There is just so much swirling on inside my head I can't take it.  I know, I know, its been like this for months now.  I blogged about this same stuff months ago, back when I was doing the 40 Days.  But seriously . . . Do I want a new job? Do I want to move? Would that move be to Minnesota? Can I commit to staying in the DC Area for the next few years?  Do I want to have a kid(s)?  Do we want a dog? Do I want to buy a house?  Am I ready to buy a house?  What am I doing with my life . . . . ahhh.  There is just too much!

So I have been nibbling away at some of these thoughts, gritting my teeth and doing the best I can, but really I have been hiding from it all.  I just can't take it.  There is so much in play and the economy being in the dumper makes me feel trapped.  Like I couldn't change jobs if I wanted too.  And as the biological clock ticks away I feel like I am running out of time to have kids - even though I am not sure I want them.  Ugh.  So basically I feel like I am cornered and racing an imaginary clock and its not even like I have a clear plan of what I want to do.  So its a bit stupid I realize to feel cornered and trapped when you don't have a plan, but that's how I feel.


I know i just need to figure out what my priorities are right now.  But how do you do that?  What do I really want?  How do I figure that out without getting all overwhelmed by each and every step that any of these possible life-altering decisions would entail?  So I've basically decided to become an ostrich - stick my head in the ground and wait until all the bad stuff goes away.  Which is not really a helpful strategy for life I don't think.  But I really don't know how ones goes about finding out what your true priorities are.  I think that's my mission but I'd really appreciate being debriefed on how I am to accomplish it. 


I think half of the reason for my overwhelmedness (yes, I know that's not a word) is that I feel a bit like I have ostrichized (yes, I know, that isn't either) the past few years of my life.  I am not trying to be all Debbie Downer and have tons of regrets.  But lets be real.  I am almost 5 years out of college - a college I worked my tail off to get into.  I worked reasonably hard to do well there.  I didn't have too much of a party life, in fact I started to wear it as a badge of honor that my school didn't really embrace the "college" lifestyle, and I was a giant dork and studied.  I graduated in the middle of the pack of my graduating class but it was a Tier 1 school, so surely people would want me, right?  Well, maybe I screwed up in the applying for jobs process, but the long and the short of it is that I never really dangled myself out there for someone to want me.  I ended up as a paralegal in the real estate department of a law firm by chance.  I don't mean to be unthankful for that job and that opportunity, because it was a job with a great group of people, but it wasn't exactly what I had planned.  But somehow I never got back to the job hunt and I never got back on the course that I guess I had imagined I would be on (Sidenote:  I am note sure that I knew then, and clearly I don't know now, what the course would've been for me.  So I am missing something but I don't know what it is.)  And here I am, five years later, not much farther along in understanding where I am going or what "the plan" is for me and my new life.


So I am here, overwhelmed, confused, and feeling a bit sad that I have "wasted" some of the last five years of my life.  I am not sure how to turn what I have been doing into a positive and into a direction that I am happy with.  So I hide.  I hide in the blissful denial of reality and home-improvement television.  I am not sure what to do next. 


That's the honest truth of what I have been not posting the last 3 weeks . . . so there - it's all hanging out. 

Namaste,
~Clare