People are always talking about “living your best life” nowadays. I was thinking to myself how I don’t even know what that means.
But I do know that, no, currently I am not living my best life.
Currently, to get to my job or my school I have to leave about two hours before. And sure, it’s time I spend listening to music, reading, or just plain thinking. Some of my greatest story ideas came from me commuting. Then I realized something. I started to feel more and more tired of the commute, and not just in the way where I rage against the MTA making the commute time longer. I was just so tired of it. It felt like I spent a portion of my life underground in one of the greatest cities in the world.
I mean, did I have to get a job or go to school in the city? No. But do I think I set my life up to be like this willingly? Also no.
It’s no secret among my friends and family that I was immensely miserable at my retail job. Everyone kept asking me why I didn’t leave it. My answer was always the same: the hours were flexible and the work wasn’t too bad for a retail job. But then the “this isn’t so bad” mindset started to wear down on me, and my feelings toward the job started to crumble. Instead I had this tension within me like, “when is this going to be over?” Everyone who knew about my long distance relationship knew that a huge part of me wanted to bridge the distance. I talked about it a lot on my social media posts.
So then this job started to become a really long waiting game. A really long “keep your head down and you’ll get by” game. I started getting anxiety because little nuances of the job I wasn’t good at. I complained, people told me not to think much of it.
Spoiler alert, I thought a lot about it.
I knew that working here wasn’t forever, but it felt forever because of how miserable I was.
I was locked in a cycle. Wake up and prepare for a long and crowded commute, then get to my job which was slowly driving me to insanity for how miserable it made me, and then take another two hour commute back home.
That was my life over and over and over, rinse and repeat.
Friends were constantly busy, but I enjoyed the days I did get to hangout with them. I made friends at school but finding time to hangout with conflicting schedules is the worst.
It just all felt very stifling.
Where was my light at the end of the tunnel? Where was my silver lining? When is it going to be a good time for me to start reconnecting with myself, and reconnecting with friends and family? When will I get to enjoy my life again? When am I going to feel passionate about stuff freely again?
But the tide is turning in my favor now. It’s going to be a big step, but I’m moving away from all of this. Literally moving away. I’m excited for this next part of my life and what it’s going to bring. I’m excited to shed away the layers of my anxiety and depression that the cycle has brought on. I know moving won’t be a fix all, cure all, but it’s going to be something positive, I just know it. There’s an energy to the idea, a momentum to the movement.
Maybe I can finally start living my best life.
Café Brando 