Tag: college

PostGrad

Finding A Home In People

When I was in college, my parents sold and moved out of my childhood home. At this point, I had been living at school most of the time, over every break. I came home one weekend and packed my stuff and said goodbye.

My childhood home hadn’t been my home for a long time. My room had been repainted and the whole place just held a lot of memories from my youth that I didn’t particularly enjoy especially after my high school boyfriend and I had just broken up. I was fine with leaving it all behind and I had found a new home at college.

And when my grandparents passed away, their house was torn down. I did one last walk through – but I wasn’t sad about saying goodbye to it. My grandparents weren’t there anymore and the last years they were there were painful and nothing at all like the memories I had created as a kid.

I walk into my other grandparent’s home and I still feel my home. I take deep breaths and try to hold on to the feeling there. But after they’re gone, I don’t think it will feel like anything at all.

Because I’ve always made homes out of people. My family grew out of our childhood home, we were located hours and plane rides away from each other and it wasn’t the home that kept us all together anymore. I feel at home with them, no matter where I am. And even at college, I tried to live in my house after everyone had left for summer and graduated – but the people were my home, not that house.

When I move out of a place (and I have moved out of quite  a few places for a 25 year old), I stare at the empty rooms and I feel sad. But as soon as I am together with my people in my next new adventure, I don’t really feel a nostalgia or need to be back in that old place.

I have no attachment to where I am because no matter where I go I can visit one of those important people and feel at home again.

apartment cabinet chair contemporary
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
PostGrad

Making Time For Your Friends In Your 20’s

When I graduated college, my friends and I all cried over the fact that life would be so different without us living just a hallway away from each other. But I don’t think I realized how different it would really be.

We all have jobs and relationships. Some people have houses and dogs. Some of us have demanding schedules. It’s really really hard to stay in touch with your friends and it can be easy to let it just fall to the side when you know they’ll always be there for you when you need them.

But needing them doesn’t always mean you’re having an actual crisis. You need your friends a lot more than you think you do, even when you have a support system at home. It’s not the same as the comfort your friends can give you.

They’re probably going through what you’re going through and you probably haven’t taken the time to properly talk about your life with someone who isn’t with you all the tine. Your friends can help you, it doesn’t need to be a time of despair. It might just be a time where you feel like you need a little more fresh air.

It takes work – a lot more work than some people are willing to put in to keep friendships around. But it’s important work. It’s the same as the effort you need to continuously put into your relationship. You can’t just expect to put people down and pick them back up when you need them.

Send the text, make the call, put together some plans. Be the person who is always reaching out with dates to see if anyone can get together. It’s exhausting and can be frustrating – but your good friends are worth it.

backlit dawn foggy friendship
Photo by Helena Lopes on Pexels.com
PostGrad

Forgetting About Your Blessings

In the deep of the day, these are the things I think about: being really tired, work, running errands at lunch, trying to eat healthy, being unhappy with the way I look, what I’m going to make for dinner, taking care of the dog, and being really tired.

These are all things that cloud my mind day in and day out to the point where it seems like that’s all my life is. These mundane things that cause me stress.

But those are just aspects of my life, things that are small but seem large. When I take a step back and look at my week, my month, my year – everything is different. I see the places I’ve traveled, the friends that I don’t get to see often but love when I do, the family that understands me, the boyfriend that is just so special along with our fur baby and reptile child. I see a stable job, an apartment we decorated and pay for all by ourselves, a routine that could seem boring but in other ways is a blessing.

It’s hard to shake the day sometimes. It’s hard to see past the tough stuff, but cherish the moments where you’re sitting on your couch after a good night’s sleep with your dog by your side and the iced coffee your boyfriend bought for you. There is so much more than stress in our lives, we just can’t forget our blessings.

bracelets dawn dusk friendship
Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com
PostGrad

What’s Making You Unhappy?

Something just isn’t quite right…but I’m not sure what it is. Do you ever look at your life because something needs to change, but you can’t figure out what it is?

It seems like a lot of good things are lined up for me. I’ve had a lot of time with my family, a lot of fun on the weekends, and have been working on bettering myself. But then there seem to be twinges of things that are not just going right – but which of them are creating so much of an impact that it’s making me unhappy?

I’ve let a lot of projects die lately. I was saying yes to as many things as I could, I was writing in a gratitude journal, I was trying to be mindful. And I don’t think those things were making huge differences in my life, but ditching them could be behind my unhappiness.

Complacency has also been a huge struggle for me lately. I have been trying to get out of my appearance rut, but haven’t been able to change anything in my daily routine. I spend a lot of time wishing the days away and then sitting on my couch and watching Netflix all evening.

Even when I get to the weekend, I have ended up doing a lot of things by myself recently and occupying my own time. I’m normally all for it, but I had been pushing myself out of my anti-social box lately and now I feel like I’m walking in circles trying to make myself happy all by myself.

None of these are huge problems. I can’t point to one and say that it’s truly making a dent into my happiness. I guess it could be all these small pebbles creating one big mountain I can’t climb. Something just isn’t quite right, but I’m not sure what it is. What’s making you unhappy?

adult art conceptual dark
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
PostGrad

Completed Spring Bucket List

The official last day of spring is less than a week away! The calendar timing of seasons feels much more appropriate to me because summer is just not the same as an adult and my busy season at work just ended so I can finally start enjoying my free time more. Check out what I got done in spring! What’s one fun thing you did this spring?

  1. Read 3 books
  2. Complete one crafting project.
  3. Have friends over to my new place
  4. Go on a weekend trip
  5. Plan a summer vacation
  6. Visit Longwood Gardens
  7. Reach 2,700 WordPress followers
    Only 55 away so basically completed 🙂
  8. Reach 6,600 Instagram followers
  9. Reach 900 Twitter followers
  10. Reach 600 Facebook page likes
  11. Go hiking in 2 places
    Just one, but good enough!
  12. Leave the state 3 times
  13. Hold a sloth
    Maybe in a few months 🙂
  14. Save $$$ for a dog!
  15. Start a garden
  16. Have a picnic
    Definitely adding this to the summer one!
  17. Take a walk outside once a week
  18. Maintain happiness and presence
  19. Create a photo album

travel

Taking A Break From Traveling

I am on a traveling hiatus, only partly by choice. Life is really busy right now and there are so many other things that require money, time, and attention.

On the one hand, my break from traveling has allowed me to see my friends more. I’ve gotten more done around the house and in my own town. I’ve been really busy at work and stacking on trips on top of work would have just been way too much for me to handle (even though I’ve done it before). I have had time to myself and to just relax.

On the other hand, I’m tired of it. I need a distraction from life and traveling is usually the one thing that whisks me away and makes me happy. I keep looking at my calendar booked with hundreds of other things like appointments, work events, family get-togethers and am just underwhelmed with the way my summer is looking.

It is possible to have too much of a good thing and I was booking trip after trip after trip with no regard for my real life. I love traveling, but I need to appreciate the here and now too. The break from traveling has been an adjustment, along with many other things going on with my life, but I feel like it has been much needed.

Taking a break from traveling has been good for me, but I’m ready to get back into it! Luckily I have a trip planned in July. Where are you going this summer?

aircraft aircraft wing airplane atmosphere
Photo by Michael Vershinin on Pexels.com

 

Break Ups

I Still Think About My Exes

I haven’t had contact with any of my exes in almost two years. Luckily, I don’t think any of them care about my blog anymore because I know they’d just be tickled to know I still think about them sometimes.

Of course I do, how could I forget? I still think of the time I got way too drunk at a casual get together in college and the time my middle school “boyfriend” broke up with me through his AIM profile. I think about everything, including my exes.

It’s just here and there, I don’t really follow any of them on social media so that made it easy to escape them. But sometimes a photo comes up in my Timehop, or I tell a funny story that included them to my friends, or I drive by a place that reminds me of them.

And I think about the good times we had a lot. It used to be only bad things, sometimes it still is. Sometimes I still cringe when I think of how many times I drunk called my most serious ex or how I completely shattered the trust of another. But I try not to cling to those things anymore and choose to remember better times. Sometimes I think about how I made the first move and asked him to our sorority date party, how I used to draw all over one boy’s arms in high school during class, how another one used to piggy back me from the driveway to my front door.

But all of those thoughts are very fleeting, that’s the key here. It is of course okay to think about your exes, they were a huge part of your life. I dated one of my boyfriends from age 16-20, that is a very defining chunk of my existence, without him it would’ve been and with him it still was.

If you think about them more than just some fleeting moments, though, you may not be ready to move on. You may not be ready to build another life separate of that heartbreak. And that’s okay too. We can’t just bury our emotions and expect them not to rise from the grave like zombies eventually. We have to accept the things that made us who we are, whether we like them or not.

woman and man sitting on brown wooden bench
Photo by Vera Arsic on Pexels.com