In 2018, I wrote a poem on my blog entitled “I Won’t Forget the Good Times.” I had been moving from my home town of East Longmeadow to the big bad city of Boston, in what I thought would be the start of a new life adventure. Well, it was an adventure, but not one that lasted as long as I had hoped. I said goodbye to the town I knew, only to return home in a little over a year.
I asked myself what went wrong. I felt like a failure. There I was writing a blog post about sailing off into the sunset as a hero in my mind and not even 2 years later, I was back.
You see, I’ve learned to not take anything for granted. I was younger then and thought it would be easier than it was to live in the big city. I didn’t know how to budget, didn’t know that making $14 an hour in Boston was not enough to support myself. I quickly and naively jumped into a situation I wasn’t prepared for. Perhaps there is something to be said about that gung-ho spirit, but there was a lack of real planning.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I survived, not thrived, in Boston from February of 2018 up until around April of 2019. It was around April of 2019 when the confetti of the Red Sox parade of October had gone away, the relationship I was in had ended two months prior, and I was struggling to find consistent work. It was time to come back home way earlier than I expected.
Since then, I have had a tough time finding my footing career-wise. Of course, the pandemic hit and threw everyone for a loop. Maybe I should give myself a little bit of grace because of that, yet there is a part of me which feels empty about the career aspect.
Despite that feeling of emptiness in some regards, I try to live the best I can now. I’ve also learned to not hold on to a specific outcome too much. Looking back, I was holding on too tightly to the fact that I wanted to live in Boston (or away from home) for the rest of my life. Well, it is not uncommon for someone in their 20s to move out and not come back. Yet, things happen and those moves are not always permanent. The best things in life have come, I think, when I didn’t try to force the outcome too much and just trusted.
Of course, I am lucky to have had my dad allow me to come home and live here for the years I have after living in Boston. It is a privilege not everyone has. The key is I still have a chance now to live somewhere else and build something, whatever it may be. I am no longer trying to force anything as far as living somewhere else and simply trying to trust the right opportunity will come eventually.
Life is about growth, I think. On paper, my life may have seemed better 5 years ago at this time. I was living in Boston, in a relationship, and had a full-time job. Nowadays, I live at home, am not working (although searching hard), and have no relationship to speak of. More importantly, however, I feel I am more mature and wiser than I was then. I have more inner peace, something that can’t be measured on paper. You can have certain things on paper, but if your mind and heart are not in the right spots, those things will eventually be lost. That was the case with me.
So, I try now to realize I will be more prepared when the next opportunity comes knocking. I don’t know when that will be, but it is OK for now. After all, why should I worry about how my life may look “on paper”? Only I really know the leaps and bounds I have made over the last 5 years and for that, I must give myself credit.
Writing Through It 