Ahh life is so crazy! Time is so fickle. Every time I sit down to write I am just blown away by where the wind has taken me. And the beauty of this moment is I truly have NO idea where I am going to end up next.
In short – stomach problems have been plaguing me, I didn’t love Boston or the research I was doing at Tufts, and the combination thereof has caused me to end up back home in Colorado, taking a year off of grad school and going to doctors to try to get healthy. Let’s not forget Cass’s wedding two weeks ago (see last blog post for the toast I gave at the wedding), or Renee’s coming up in 5 months. So many exciting things going on!
Back to this lovely moment. I’ve spent the last week moving in and making space for myself in what was/is the guest room at my parent’s house. Moving back in with the rents seems weird in some ways, but also so normal and so good. I am truly thankful to have parents kind enough to let me move back in with them, and who are so cool that I am excited to get to spend so much time with them!
I think the strangest thing about this phase for me is that I am no longer a student. I have had this “occupation”, this definition of me and my current purpose for the last 18 years. For 18 years whenever someone asked me what I did my response was simply “I am a student.” For 5 of those years, the follow up conversation has included my passion and delight in chemistry. As of two years ago the conversation continued smoothly on to discuss my plans to attend graduate school and pursue my doctoral degree in hopes of going on to do research or “maybe eventually end up teaching.”
And I did, I went to Tufts and put in my first year as a graduate student. And I do still love chemistry, and I do still think I might end up teaching some day. It was fun to experience something new and live on the east coast. But something wasn’t right. I was not happy, and my body was showing evidence of the stress, getting worse every day.
So now I have aborted that plan, and am in search of a new one. And for the interim, I am NOT a student. I’m hoping to work as a barista, maybe a chemistry tutor, and most hopefully a Zumba instructor. I can’t actually wrap my mind around the fact that at the end of August I will not be getting a class schedule, I will not be meeting new friends in class, I will not be buying fresh notebooks to fill with complicated chemical ramblings, and I will not be following the routine of school that I have come to know so well.
But let’s not be too dramatic, I may be back in school come next fall. There is a perfectly good chance I will enroll in a different graduate program and be getting started in a year. Yet there is just as good of a chance I may never go back to school again. Should I discover something else I am more passionate about, if an opportunity comes by that is just too good to pass up – I’m takin it! And that will be the end of that. I told you life was crazy, and time fickle.
For now – here’s to exploring what life OUTSIDE of school is like. What it means to no longer be a student. (So far it means no classes, no homework, and no tests – woot to that!!)
Carpe diem, right? Let’s do this.
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