I always joke that my phone and my iPad must be psychic and are listening to my thoughts lately, because, without looking or clicking for certain things, some ads still seem to popup and make an appearance on my social media feeds.
As this year I turn forty, I have been thinking and rethinking a lot about my journey in this world and all the things I have done, done wrong or haven’t done at all. I guess is all part of the milestone: you are going to put yourself under the microscope looking for things to be over-analyzed. Fact.
Oh, well. One theme that has been quite present in this recap of my youth ( I sound like a grandmother) is the first time I lived by myself. I somehow was able to convince my parents to let me have a gap year after high school to study abroad. I pestered them all the way from freshman to senior year, begging to let me do it. Somehow, still not certain on the how part, they asked me after graduation: you have to make a choice and if you really want to have the year abroad, you cannot ask for anything else. That is it. No driving lessons, no car (insert privilege here if you think fit). I, of course, chose the trip, thinking that I’d rather go somewhere more distant than just a drive away from my place.
From all places, I chose going to New York: first to Albany and then New York City. I was suppose to make my English better from 9 to 3 and have the rest of the time for whatever I wanted to do. I was 19 living by myself for the first time. In New York. Ok, alright. Actually, not alright at all. One difficult year it was, I’ll say!
So, what does this has to do with my social media poltergeist ads, like I said in the beginning? Last week, many times, I got ads for studying in NYC, from different places. My husband even asked me, out of the blue, about the stratospheric costs of living in the city and if they were real. It was that plus my midlife crisis, of some sorts, that made me question myself: what the hell was I thinking when I moved there?
I was 19, now I am 39. Twenty years apart and a lifetime of choices in between. I am not the same, at all. It made me think harder, are we stupid when young? Are we just naive? Or, are we both? The amount of hope and positivity that came with me moving to NY in order to find out more on studying film is nothing but laughable to my old self nowadays. When did I become so ground to earth…or should I say, bitter? New question: adults are realistic or just plain pessimists? I know that one of the reasons for me not going ahead with plans, was my lack of funding and the lack of support (financial and emotional) from my family. After realizing I had no means to pay for a degree in film or scriptwriting while making a living and all, my family was happy to know that I took an ESL teacher’s training course path instead and was coming back home for attending a local uni as a languages and lit major. What a change and never looked back. Until now.
I kept thinking: is adult life where dreams to go die? I think, sometimes is the case. For me and many others that I know. But… could I have tried harder, anyways? Yes. I could have come back sometime in the future, have done everything with my own money when I was older. I could have tried applying for a scholarship. I could have tried writing another way (hello blog!). There were many ways apart from the one I chose. Sometimes you don’t get to walk the path you thought, but there are other ways to get there. It was my choice to go somewhere different. I have to live with that. Period.
Unfortunately, I cannot go back and tell my young self that she should find a balance between life and dreaming in order to keep the dream alive, or maybe even in an induced coma, that sometimes things don’t happen like we wanted to, but it doesn’t mean they cannot happen some other way. Maybe growing older made me less pigheaded too. Oh well (again), for now all I can do I just laugh thinking on how anyone who isn’t Monica Geller is making do in the city…
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