Spinster

Ok, so sometimes I actually have a lot of things that I want to write about, but I’m not sure if I should cause they’re not funny or even amusing. They might not even be interesting. But I guess they’re what I’ve been consumed with lately, and it helps me to figure things out by writing them down.

I am done with graduate school on Tuesday of next week. Two years ago, when I was applying for this program — actually, by this point I think I’d been accepted and was deciding to go or not — I had one of those flippant sort of I-don’t-want-to-analyze-this-any-more thoughts, and brushed aside any doubts that I had about library school or archives and told myself, By the time you’re done with the program, you’ll have figured it out. Surely, a job will have presented itself/you’ll have met someone and the decision about where to live will be made for you/you’ll be dead and none of it will matter anyway. Well, short of me getting hit by a bus between now and Tuesday, none of those things have come to pass. I don’t have a full-time job lined up; I haven’t been drawn to one specific locale by a person or a position.

What am I going to do now? That’s a question I ask myself every day, every hour, every minute. My entire waking life is consumed with that question and its colleagues: what am I going to do now? where am I going to live? what will my future be? I’m not Canadian; without a study permit extension I can’t stay here past the first of August. I hate Miami, my hometown, and I don’t want to live there again. I’m in this limbo, the limbo of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the fucking terrifying, and I don’t like it one bit. I’ve lived in Miami, Portland, Miami again, and now Toronto, and each time I’ve moved, it’s been scary. Each time, I’ve survived, I’ve learned things about myself and my habits, I’ve gone through the process of making new friends and learning new driving/public transit routes, I’ve learned a new vocabulary: how to pronounce “Spadina” and “Dundas” and nicknames like “T-dot” and “PDX.” I’ve learned that you can’t go home again because your parents moved and you no longer have a bedroom. I’ve learned that no matter where you go, you’ll always be a product of your upbringing and your hometown. But what has this education been for? Why do I keep doing this to myself? These have been my choices; no one forced me to go all the way across the country for college, though I wouldn’t say that my parents discouraged it. No one suggested that I move to Canada for grad school. I find it hilarious that it’s me who makes these choices. I don’t consider myself a brave person. I am not a gregarious extrovert who makes friends easily, and I’ve been known to walk miles in order to have to avoid looking like an idiot on an unfamiliar bus route. And still, I choose these unfamiliar cities, places where I know no one, in spite of this almost unspeakable urge to put down roots and get a cat.

So, what the fuck am I doing? I have no idea.