my cloud of thoughts

From time to time, I space out and look at the Facebook page of people from high school. Mostly people I know peripherally but those who have gotten married, had babies and/or bought houses.

I'm still really wary and a little judgmental of them, especially of their mass photo postings (but that's another issue with oversharing all together). I don't know; it's just such a foreign idea to me. But then at the same time, there are people much closer to me making the same decisions and yet I'm ok with that. Maybe it's because I know them well enough to approve of their choices. Or to know that even if it's not something I want now, it's something good for them.

I suppose it's no surprise that I fall into another Facebook baby photo-ing the day I make my first student loan payment. I had to dig through the pile of crap in my corner and move my Yale diploma to reach my shoebox of loan statements.

Seriously, my Yale diploma is literally sitting in the corner gathering dust.

In other worlds, I'm organizing a 5k run for the spring. I suppose I wouldn't be able to do that without my YDS experiences, so maybe that diploma isn't just gathering dust. Tomorrow I'm scheduling my interview with a well-known teaching program, a program I wouldn't be interested in and probably not a good candidate for without YDS and its influence.

I guess my point is that I would not have guessed this is where I'd be five years ago.

I still feel like I'm in a point of transition, but a very slooooooow transition, one fraught with stresses of making ends meet and making sure my kids are prepared for kindergarten. It's a carefully constructed transition. It's precise. It's stagnant yet always moving. Slow enough that I'm beginning to feel comfortable in the changing, yet antsy for rapid change. At the same time, it's already November and I don't know if my kids know anything more than they did at the beginning of the year.

Does any of this make sense?

Here's what I'm trying to say: From the briefest glimpse at lives long lost and removed from my own, it looks like people have their "stuff" together, whatever that "stuff" may be. And I still feel adrift at sea, trying to find my bearings while feeling the need to justify an experience that fundamentally changed me yet has produced little outside materialization of that.

I know pictures lie and life is endlessly complicated for everyone. And yet, it just looks so simple and wrapped up neatly with a bow in ways that my messy and in-need-of-explanation life cannot. And those closest to me making those same decisions also have explanation-worthy lives because I've heard and lived through the explanations. So it's ok.

Does any of this make sense?