Feeling: settled
Listening to: Morrissey - Interlude
Reading/Watching: the A&M game- Puppy's suited up, woo!

I hear people say "everything would be fine if I could just get this one thing together."

For some people, it's their love life, or finding a job, or managing their money, or paying bills on time. For me, it's my weight. I try a million things to try and adjust it, but it winds up stubbornly centered around the same jeans size, no matter what I change.

But everybody's got something. There is always going to be one corner of your life that is just utterly beyond your control (barring the obvious factors, like some drunk driver barrelling across a dotted line and smashing your life away).

People freak out about it, too. They groan and get anxious and just twist themselves into knots trying to figure out why they can't get it together.
You know why it's out of control? Because it's your thing.

Everyone has something that they just cannot keep in line, and while everyone else around might have absolutely no trouble with it, it's still the one thing. And if you somehow miraculously learn to harness the problem and keep it from hurting you, it never quite goes away, because it remains a problem in your mind.

I was thinking about that the other day, how everyone has their thing they can't seem to deal with, and sometimes it's uncontrolled to the point that other people get irritated and give up on someone because they just "can't get it together." It's saddening, really, because, look at yourself. Before you decide that someone else is a hopeless case and a human mess, make sure that every single aspect of your life is under your control. Then you can start judging.

Me, I feel a bit better realizing that there will always be something in my life that's beyond my control. It almost gives me a sense of safety, acknowledging it. I'll keep fighting to get a handle on it, of course, because you can't not fight it, but at least I won't feel like an idiot for being unable to become the perfect paragon of a human being, because you know what? It doesn't exist.

With that in mind, I've also done one other thing to give my life a sense of control. I'm still applying to graduate schools, but with the intention of starting in fall of 2006. I'm deferring for a year. I want to take some time to live as an adult, without school to give me structure and an excuse for slacking job-wise.
That, and I want to finish the book. I want to publish it. I want to live in an apartment and earn my rent and actually complete a goal, and I want to do it in the city I love. I want to live life without a safety net.

It feels unbelievably good to decide this, finally.

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