Divisions and Precisions

Moving In/Moving On

Well, here I am, almost at the halfway point for my current lease. I can't believe I've been in this apartment for almost six months, but it's really true. (And I still haven't gotten around to posting those pictures of the apartment. Shame on me!) I'm pleased to report that things are still going well. Going back to school will put a bit of a dent in my savings, but only temporarily. I've had six whole months of living like a real, live adult, and I like it. Good thing, too, cause I think my time of kid-dom is gone for good.

I was pretty nervous when I moved in back in January. I wasn't completely sure I was ready to live on my own again. Living with my parents, despite any inconveniences, was very secure, and in a lot of ways, very easy. I could deal with the fact that I was 29 and living in my parents' spare bedroom by telling myself that I was putting myself through school. I didn't have to worry about housework or cooking or much of anything, and I got pretty lazy. Even aside from laziness, the year and a half I spent living on my own before that had pretty much been a disaster. I couldn't make ends meet, I couldn't keep my house up, I couldn't keep much of anything together. I didn't move into my parents' house in December 2000. I retreated to it.

So even though everything seemed to tell me it was time for me to move out back in January, I just wasn't sure if I could deal with it.

Not only have I dealt with it, I'm doing even better than I'd hoped. I had dinner at my house this past Sunday, for Mother's Day. When my mom and stepdad and aunt and uncle were there, I was so proud of myself. Not just for cooking a tasty dinner (which I did, go me), but for keeping my life in decent enough order that the thought of throwing a family dinner didn't send me into a tizzy. I don't have to panic when someone wants to come over. I don't freak out everytime the phone rings, thinking it's a bill collector. God help me, I'm actually repairing my credit.

In short, I'm doing all of the things I thought I was ready to do back when I got married at nineteen. Hey, it's only taken me eleven years to grow up from that! I guess you could say I've moved on.

The decade between my marriage and my moving out from my parents' (again) was my real adolescence, in a way. I learned a lot about what the real world was like when I was married, and I learned how to retreat from it, to hide from it behind an illness I didn't fully understand, much less realize I had. When I left my marriage, there came several years of relearning what the world was like, and learning how to fight my depression. Somewhere in there, I decided I was all better, and that I was really grown up. I wasn't, of course, and I wound up in the mess that was 2000.

Looking back on my perspective of six months, spending a year living with my parents was absolutely the best thing I could have done. I spent that time regrouping in every aspect of my life: financially, emotionally, physically, mentally. I started back to school. I re-established a close relationship with my mom, which is one of the best things about my life right now. 2001 was a hard year. Losing Grandma last summer was horrible, but in its way as well, it was an incredibly positive experience for me as a person. Throughout the course of the year, I learned to trust myself again, to have faith in myself. It's ironic, isn't it, that I had to move in with my parents in order to grow up?

By moving in to my apartment, I was ready to prove to myself that I really had moved on from the eternal fuckup image I had of myself in my twenties. It feels very appropriate that this sort of demarcation between two different times in my life should fall so close to my 30th birthday. I started my twenties as a scared, often depressed young wife who didn't really have any business being married and wasn't sure what she was going to do with her life. I'm starting my thirties (in less than two months now!) as a confident woman who, while she still has hangups and neuroses, knows where she wants to go and is working to get there.

Dear god. Just imagine what I might become in my forties!

(This entry is all about me being On Display.)

Posted by Lisa at May 17, 2002 05:21 PM