It's past midnight and past my bedtime but I thought I'd take a couple of minutes to write something here.

I don't know where to start - I never really do - but let me just jump right in. Things have happened and continue to keep happening: bad things, not so bad things, strange things, sobering things, different things. Things.
Things that I won't tell you, things that are best kept quiet, things only uttered over lukewarm paper cups of milky coffee on late nights, empty streets and cold winds.

The nature of such things aren't entirely relevant to whatever I might want to say right now anyway.

I think I finally know what I want to do with my life.

Sorry to get all emo-shemo and existentialist but isn't that what we're all doing anyway.
We all pretend to know what we're doing, we all pretend to be so secure in our present condition, we scoff and rattle off page after page of prospective future plans and careers, checking boxes down the proverbial bucket lists.
We enjoy seeking false comfort in the pretense that everything that happens to us was either planned or was in some way a small (yet critical) part of the grand scheme of your Life Plan.

But we're all just fumbling around in the dark,
bouncing off the walls as we go.

We don't know what we're doing.
We don't know why we put ourselves through decades of schooling, we don't know why we move away and then move back. We don't know what kind of job we want, whether we want a job or not.
We don't know whether or not we want to get married; if we do, we don't know when we want that day to come.
We don't know if we're career-driven or family-driven, we're all probably a bit of both but how many parts career to family or vice versa? We don't know.

We pretend we do.
She wants a Masters or a PhD, she says. Work experience for a couple of years and then she might consider law school as a career change, she says.
Married by 28, three kids and a pretty little townhouse upstate.
He plans to start up his own business by 25. Tending to his investments while he learns a new language. Perhaps relocate to China or Brazil; family can wait.
We rehearse these stories often; practising our lines whenever a family member or prospective employer starts up a conversation and asks.

But we really don't know.
None of us do.

And yet, strangely enough, thousands of miles away - I am very literally almost the furthest possible I can get from home; 12 hours behind, on the very other side of the Earth - it's here, in this strange city, the capital of the Western world, that I think...
I'm finally beginning to separate the threads of things I should want and the things I really do want,
and I think I'm finally beginning to untangle what I really want to do and see myself doing after I finish school.

A little over 20 years of people asking me what I want to be when I grow up
Lying through my teeth all over my personal statements and statements of purpose and interviews and networking conversations - pretending, consistently pretending (very convincingly though, might I add) that I know exactly where my interests and ambitions lie.

Hell, I don't even know how I got here.
I can't remember why I picked what I picked to do at University.
I sort of just fell into it; it seemed like the least worst option at the time, perhaps.
I'm pretty sure I could've just as easily fallen into something like medicine or law or marketing.

But instead, I'm here.
Swimming about in this accidental pool trying to find my way around.
Though - going back to my initial point - I think slowly I'm figuring it out.
I think I can finally start coming up with a real answer.

So perhaps I will begin updating again. Don't take my word for it, chances are I'll abandon this right after I publish this post haha.

I'm cold, I'm still kinda jetlagged and my appetite has increased 300% since I arrived. I'm constantly hungry, I haven't gone out to get groceries yet - thank goodness I still had some chicken in my freezer - and I've only just finished cleaning my room and unpacking.

I don't hate DC.
I don't.
I think DC is a great place, the university is great, my professors are great, it's all just... Great.
But it's not DC, it's me.
In a nutshell, I think I'm just tired of school and kindasortajustwanna go home.

I think doing my Masters straight after graduating was a bit of a catch 22, really. Leaving immediately didn't give me a chance to miss school, so all my leftover tiredness from final year just carried itself over in my personal ledger of motivation. It was more than a little stressful to move all my crap from the UK to Brunei, only for me to leave again before all my stuff even arrived. Everything happened way too fast and I stepped off the convocation dais straight into my next classroom.
But had I not left immediately, I might not have been able to defer entry so I wouldn't have been able to come to Georgetown. If I'd found a job, there was the possibility of me being tied down so I wouldn't get approval to leave the following year.
So I kinda had to go, even if I didn't really want to anymore.

And it's not DC, don't get me wrong.
I'm just not in a great state of mind anymore, having to reset my life when all the people I love and care for (with the exception of one or two) are either across the Atlantic in the UK or, literally, halfway across on the other side of the globe in Brunei.
It's tough, I'm jaded - I've been embroiled in the entire education system for almost twenty consecutive years now. The only break I'd ever had was the 9 months after my A'levels, which is probably why I left home more excited than anything and didn't suffer from any serious bouts of homesickness even if it was the first time I'd ever properly moved away from home.

I'm a big girl, I know. I can carry myself on my own. I'm old enough, mature enough and independent enough to live in this land so far, far away. I can take it. I'm made of pretty sturdy stuff.
But y'know, at the end of the day I truly am tired of doing what I should do. And I really do look forward to the day I do what I want to do.
I did want this. But it was really just a symptom of my over-ambitious self making lists and ticking boxes and drafting out my future resume.
This experience has and will continue to be good to me, I'm sure.
But I'm far less ambitious, and I'm just going through the motions and letting things fall into my lap as I go along. I'm not really seeking out co-curricular activities, I haven't networked at all, I can't be bothered to suck up to my professors outside of class, I don't really care about interning.

I was talking to one of my bestfriends, who is here too - thank goodness.
Well if anyone reading knows me at all, you probably know who I'm talking about. But mana tau she wouldn't want her name here or something haha.
But we were talking about how we should really do something, intern - make use of our time! This was at the very beginning. We were both really ambitious and determined to do supercalifragamazing things. And we really wanted to "do something with our lives".
It didn't take long for us to realise that.. Hang on, we already are.
Which is true.
I'm doing my Masters here. I'm already doing something with my life.
I have no inclination to overdo it and, I dunno, intern at three different agencies before going back or something.
I'm just tired.


So in that nutshell - it's great here but I'm not in it 100%. I do look forward to the day I finish and can go home and kick back and relax a bit. I do look forward to applying for jobs and earning money; I'm pretty sick of being a broke student.
I enjoy studying and all that but I think I've been away from home for far too long and as much as life outside the bubble is much more colourful and exciting, I really do just want to sit on the swing in my garden and love life in slow, silent ways.

But. Back to my reality.
I have a paper due on Tuesday. I haven't been here for a week, even. And I've already got work due.
This'll be a very heavy semester for me; I'm taking one more class than I did last semester. And one of my classes is a PhD level class which I'm taking because the Professor is really, really good and everyone who's spoken about him has said to take a class with him if I ever get the chance.
So me and one of my closer coursemates have decided to take this class and we're the youngest in the class by far. Everyone else has multiple degrees, yeaaars worth of relevant experience and thinning scalps.
One of my classmates is an FBI agent, HOW COOL IS THAT! He even looks the part, it's magnificent. He's dressed well and old-ish but smart-ish and you can totally imagine the badge and everything, lol.
But I'm still class shopping, need to sign up for one more class and I don't know which.

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