A field guide to growing up without growing apart
Today I bailed. When I think of bailing on something, I think of totally and completely failing. To bail is to let weakness and fear and laziness and confusion win. It is not only have given the wrong answer in the first place, but also […]
A few months ago my friend went crazy. Now when I say crazy I don’t mean like fun- excited- let’s party- crazy, I mean like mental- hospital crazy. Yeah. Scary. She had been depressed for a few months, maybe closer to a year, so she […]
When something seems too good to be true, it usually is, right?
I’ve posted in the past about how things happen to be going very well in my life right now. Great husband, great job, done with my education, getting to see the world, not having to worry about money, etc. In pretty much every way, I look around at my life and I know I am blessed beyond belief.
When I think about it more deeply, I also realize that my entire life has been pretty charmed. Raised in an upper-middle class, intact family, most things came easily to me, and I didn’t have any traumatizing experiences like a close relative or friend dying. In college, my parents paid my tuition, I made awesome friends like the Naughty Princesses, and I met the love of my life. What else can a girl ask for?
But the inner pessimist in me tends to get a bit uneasy when I look too closely at how lucky I have been. After all, the laws of probability would say that this kind of good fortune can’t last forever. Eventually, the other shoe is going to drop. My luck will run out. And there are times I am absolutely terrified of what that will look like.
There are just so many terrible things that can happen to a person in this world, and I’ve seen many of them at work in the lives of those around me. Loved ones killed in car accidents, miscarriages, losing a spouse or a child to cancer, becoming permanently disabled…All these things have happened to people I love, but not to me. I feel guilt and fear just writing those words. Who am I to be living a life of relative bliss, when so many others have suffered and are suffering?
If I got in a car and drove north for a couple of days, I would find myself in the midst of a war-zone, where people are being murdered for their faith, or for no reason at all. Young girls and women are being bought and sold as sex slaves. But here I am, safe, healthy, loved, and very much in a bubble.
When I allow myself to think about all this, I am very grateful. But I am also fearful, because I can imagine so many scenarios in which my “luck” runs out: my wayward brother commits suicide, one of my parents suffers a heart attack, my husband or I are diagnosed with a terrible disease. And the longer I live, the closer, it seems, I am to one of these scary possibilities becoming reality.
But, what can I do about this? Most of the things I fear the most are beyond my control. I don’t want to let paranoia rob me of what really has been one of the happiest seasons of my life. I have to trust that when trials come, I’ll be able to face them with strength. And I hope I can also be a good friend to those I know and love who are already dealing with the kind of pain and loss I can’t truly understand.
A few months ago the father of my close friends died. Our parents raised us together, me and a pair of twins, a boy and a girl (I’ll call them Rachel and Charles) and I’m so grateful for them. We lived on opposite sides of […]
So, as you have all heard, Cinderslut has become a teacher. She’s passed all of her classes, done her student teaching, and landed herself a new teaching job this fall. Many congrats to her! However, this post is about me. It turns out that two […]
A couple of months ago I mentioned that my husband wanted us to buy a house, but that this gargantuan, adult-sized task was freaking me out. Whelp…as of last month we are officially home-owners! The fact that I went from quaking in my boots at the thought of a mortgage to signing the final papers in 10 weeks is pretty crazy. The process felt overwhelming, stressful, tedious, ill-advised, and fun, all at different points, but somehow we made it through, signed away half our life savings, and now own a 900-square foot condo 15 minutes north of Seattle, WA. Here’s how it went down:
Early on in my stateside student-teaching stint (alliteration, yay!) my husband started throwing out the idea of me “finding us a house to buy.” He was right that we needed to invest our money in something other than his work retirement accounts, and I knew this was the best opportunity we’d have for years to come, as we are never in the U.S. for more than three consecutive weeks, and there I was with 4+ months stretching in front of me. The housing market was heating up fast, so anything we bought would likely increase in value, at least some. But the idea of being the point-person, the one touring the homes and making the calls and signing the papers, was absolutely daunting. How could I, knowing next to nothing about real estate, lead us in this endeavor? I freaked out for a few weeks, but the idea kept coming up in our conversations, and I knew it wasn’t a terrible plan. I also knew that though it would be scary, I would learn a lot through the process. In my heart, I didn’t want to shy away from this just because it was a commitment, a risk, and a big question mark. So, I went for it.
My first step was to send a rambling email to one of my friends, who also happens to be a mortgage loan officer. I explained how we wanted to get into the market, but how I had all these questions and fears and I didn’t know what I was doing. She calmed me down, outlined a few of the steps I needed to take, and generally talked me off the ledge I was on. I needed someone else to reassure me that it was a smart plan, and she provided that. I also reached out via a church-based social-networking site to find a couple of real estate agents. I corresponded with them for a few days and discussed what the market was like and what kinds of properties I should look at. Ultimately, though, I decided to work with another realtor who had been referred to me by one of my husband’s aunts.
My realtor, Fred, also did a great job of answering questions and making the process easy. We sent links to properties back and forth and discussed price ranges until I felt like I knew what I was looking for. This part of the process was great because I could just send an email whenever a question popped into my mind and Fred would answer it or refer me to someone who could answer it. I never felt like an idiot, either, which was pretty amazing. At the same time, my husband and I also gathered up the required documents to get pre-approved by my friend’s mortgage company. This was pretty easy too—we just sent in copies of our tax returns, recent pay stubs, etc, and they pre-approved us, meaning that we had a definite price range we knew we could get a loan for.
Even though I thought I knew what we wanted, when I actually started visiting properties I got super confused. Fred took me to 6 different places over two different weekends, and I dragged my father-in-law along for moral support and advice. All of the places we looked at were condos; since they’re cheaper than houses, we felt like we could afford a nicer place than we would have been able to in an actual house, yet it could rent for just as much or more. Each condo had its pros and cons, but it wasn’t until I expanded my horizons a bit and looked outside of the city of Seattle itself that I started to hone in on the right one.
It was hard to choose, because all the properties had great things about them, and it was impossible to discern which one would really hold its value the best. You can’t know what hidden problems a property might have or what costs will jump out of nowhere. With condos, we also had to consider what utilities were included, what common features it had that might add to its value, what the monthly dues were, and how well the Homeowner’s Association was being run. At times, I was so conflicted I wanted to give up altogether.
But, eventually my obsessive browsing of real estate sites like Redfin turned up an interesting find. It was a great price–$50,000-$100,000 cheaper than some of the condos in Seattle we had looked at, had two bedrooms and 1.5 baths (very rentable!), a pool, and HOA dues within a reasonable range. I visited it during my second round of tours with Fred, and I liked it just as much as I had just from looking at the photos online. Compared to the other condos we looked at that day, it was clearly the best value, and I knew it would get snapped up fast.
We took the plunge and made an offer, $10,000 lower than what they were asking. They countered with $2000 lower than asking. While we had hoped for a screaming deal, we couldn’t deny that it was probably worth that price, and we didn’t want to lose it, so we agreed. This was all fairly easy and painless—we just communicated with Fred via email and he talked to the seller. When there were papers to sign, my husband and I could both do so online. Easy-peasy.
With our offer accepted, the sale was officially “pending,” and I announced to a few friends that we were buying a home. Then began the weeks-long process of actually getting it to close. It turns out that actually getting your loan approved is a much more arduous process than getting pre-approved. We had to submit a whole bunch of other documents, including a few signed letters explaining dumb things, like why I had my parents’ address listed on one of my old tax returns (because I lived there, duh?). At times it seemed like the mortgage people were just trying to annoy us. When my husband had to write a letter explaining why his company sometimes deposited extra money in his account aside from his paycheck (as compensation for travel expenses, nothing sketchy at all!) he was actually pretty peeved, feeling like it was somehow personal, like they didn’t trust his verbal explanation. I talked to my parents about this, and they had similar stories from when they had bought their house. It doesn’t always make sense, but the lenders always want to cover ALL the bases, and then cover them again. Some of the documents we had to wait, and wait, and wait, to get from the condo’s HOA itself. In the meantime we had to pay for a $250 inspection, a $675 appraisal, and pay $1500 in “earnest money.”
My husband being in Saudi Arabia was an additional complication, obviously. He could sign a lot of the forms online, or print, sign, scan, and email them back. But for the actual signing to buy the house we needed to set up a power of attorney so I could sign for him. This required him to take a trip into the nearest big city to visit the U.S. Consulate and get the POA notarized. Then he had to pay to FedEx those documents back to the mortgage place.
Finally the day arrived when I actually got to sign the papers. And believe me, there were SO many papers. It took me over an hour to sign all of them, partially because I also had to sign for my hubby as well on each and every one. Needless to say, there was no time to actually read all the fine print…so I hope I didn’t sign away my soul in the process. But hey—we were homeowners!
Then the work of being a homeowner began: I had to find a property manager to take care of it for us while we were overseas, steam-clean the carpets, repaint the entry, have a few minor repairs done, and find homeowners’ insurance. We waited for a month before our property manager found us tenants, but as of now we have the place successfully rented out, and we have started receiving rent money from them. The process was stressful and humbling, but it taught me a lot. I still don’t entirely understand real estate and escrow and insurance and all the things that go along with this kind of major purchase, but I’m a lot closer than I was at the start. Furthermore, I’m proud that I stuck with it and took a risk; I don’t know how the investment will pan out in the long term, but I’m excited to find out. Even in the worst-case scenario, I know we’re still young and won’t be bankrupted forever by one bad investment.
To me, buying a house was even more formidable than getting married, and more hassle than moving to the Middle East. But I didn’t give up on it, and I’m glad to be on the other side now, yet another adult milestone achieved. I’ll let you know how it goes!
Something I’ve learned about marriage in the last two years is that two becoming one isn’t always the blissful, intimate, romantic idea that the pastor talks about on your wedding day. Actually, life was a little simpler when I was…one. Solo. The challenge of combining […]
I hate that depression is a thing.
Last week when Cindy posted about possibly being depressed I cringed a bit at the word, feeling fairly confident that Cindy’s low mood was just that, a bit of a down time in a lifetime of millions of other emotions. To call it depression is to align it with the ‘real’ kind that brings to mind drugs, shrinks and so many other dark connotations. Surely Cindy isn’t THAT bad, I told myself, real depression is a chemical, biological imbalance that definitely isn’t her.
But what is ‘real depression’ and who has it anyway? I have countless friends who’ve told my they’re depressed over the years, ignoring me as I advised against drugs and insisted we all get low sometimes. I tell myself they’re over reacting as they go to weekly counseling sessions and post melancholy facebook status updates, told them to drink more water and get more exercise as they pulled away from the world. I’ve never quite believed they were really depressed, categorizing them more as bored, lazy, unsure, insecure, scared or just plain 20-something. Depression is for other people, not for smart, capable people who are just in a rut.
But yesterday my brother told me he’s been at the lowest part of his life for the last few weeks, that he’s really felt this badly for a few years now but has been keeping it hidden, that he doesn’t trust another person in the entire world with all the darkness that is the real him.
At first I reacted like I always do when people I know to be fully capable and functioning humans tell me they’re more than unhappy, reminding him everyone fails classes and gets angry with the world sometimes and that things can change anytime. Feeling sad today doesn’t mean you have to be sad tomorrow or that you have a problem that needs external fixing. Categorizing yourself as something doesn’t help other than to give you an excuse to act a certain way. But this only made him angry at me for calling his problem common, though he countered with the very common argument that everyone else seems to have their lives figured out.
We all obviously don’t, just from reading this blog I’m sure you can see four fine examples of people still figuring it out, and in truth just a few hours before talking to my brother yesterday I was thinking to myself that I miss being joyful, that in the last few months I’ve forgotten how to really laugh.
I’ve been traveling Europe for two months now and while I’ve seen and done a ridiculous amount of wonderful things, I haven’t been particularly happy. Moving from place to place so often I’ve felt much more lonely, insecure, reserved, grumpy, and disappointed than I expected. Finding myself jealous of the giddy and loud school groups who tromp through museums and train stations without any regard for anything except their own immediate joy. There have been many other times I’ve felt grateful and impressed and content and in awe and confident and excited and relieved and proud on this adventure, but rarely have I felt really blissfully happy and while I wouldn’t ever call myself depressed, I would say that I’ve been down, in a rut that I will someday shake.
When I realized this and tried to snap out of my melancholy mood I just couldn’t quite get there, ending up more frustrated than happy, worried that I wouldn’t figure out how to be the person I wanted to be anytime soon. Not that I’m stopping to think about it I can see how easy it would be to let a small scale issue like that get exaggerated into a larger one, how scary it would be to feel like you have no control over your emotions or moods over weeks and months and years. Maybe depression like that would require some extra help and I’ve been doing more harm than good by discouraging the word.
After listening to my brother say he was just sick of feeling this way I started to consider that maybe getting a little outside assistance wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, that even though I know he doesn’t have ‘real depression’ he may have some mild form of it that would pass faster with a little help.
I still think his is mostly situational (he’s a 20 something male with a poor dating record, bad grades, no real career goals and mediocre friends); if even one of these variables improved I think he’d be fine, working through it until more things fall into place. It would be a shame if he got addicted to antidepressants or convinced he had a lasting problem just because of these changeable things.
But maybe I’ve been the wrong one all along and depression isn’t only a biological emotional state that you are powerless to change. Maybe depression isn’t as scary as all that, maybe all these people are just ‘down’ like I’ve been and instead of getting through it in the ways I do, they’re taking other paths. We’re all different, maybe it makes sense that all of our depressions are different too.
Blah, I hate that people get sad and that we have a term for it that somehow makes it okay and terrible all at once.
In the meantime I’m going to keep sucking it up and doing my best to learn and grow and be grateful and joyful. I’m going to take each day as it comes, assuming it to be entirely independent of the day before and in no way indicative of what is to come. And I’m going to do what I can to help my brother because I know the things that make me feel better (Thinking about more than just myself, going outside and interacting with the world) can’t hurt.
I leave to raft the Grand Canyon in less than 14 hours. I’m excited. I’m lucky. I’m overwhelmed. I’m all things all at once. But mostly, mostly I’m disappointed. If the Senate and the House don’t come to a decision by tomorrow night the National […]
Fear. It’s something everyone is familiar with, and something that all twentysomething’s definitely struggle with on a daily basis. This month we’re opening up and letting you in on what fears plague us most.
I think my biggest fear right now is that I don’t have what it takes. I know that’s vague and could mean a lot of things, and it does mean a lot of different things to me.
I see all these people who are aggressive about making their careers take off, or their travel plans come true, and then I look at my life and what I’ve done and the fear starts to gnaw at me. Am I doing enough? Should I put myself out there more? Am I just settling? I have job that’s fine, but not challenging, and not in the area I dreamed about when I graduated college. I enjoy it, but when I see people who get these ridiculously awesome opportunities to teach abroad, or work for a non profit, I start to feel inadequate. And I worry that I haven’t tried hard enough. I applied to some awesome opportunities when I graduated, but none of them worked out. So why does it seem like it’s worked out for everyone else? That’s when the fear comes in. I must not be good enough. I don’t have the gumption, the aggressive nature, the go-getter spirit, that makes people pay attention and want me to be a part of their cause.
And then I think about the future and the fear spirals out of control sometimes. It goes from I don’t have what it takes, to I’ll never have what it takes. I see myself staying in the same place, not accomplishing anything, while all around me people are living the dream of seeing the world. And the fear paralyzes me. I don’t want to apply for more things because I only see it ending in rejection. I would just travel the world myself, but that requires finances that I don’t have right now, and don’t see myself having available anytime in the near future. So instead, I battle this fear of inadequacy, and try not to let it win.
I work really hard not to let fear influence my life. Whenever I feel afraid I try my best to push past it, proving to myself and others that fear is rarely justified. Sure I let the occasional spider freak me out, but other times I consciously let her go and choose to believe she’ll leave me alone. I don’t want to live my life wary of strangers, heights, needles, men, germs, death, sharks, public speaking, or heavy machinery; so while those things may scare me, I know they’ll never stop me from doing the things I want to do.
The only things we’re really afraid of are the fears that bring us to inaction, the things that stop us from moving forward. I know this because I’m afraid to make a choice about my future, so much so that I’ve just straight up avoided it for going on two years now.
There are so many wonderful things going on in the world, so many different routes I can take to fill my time, how on earth am I supposed to choose the best one for me? I don’t want my future self to look around at her life and wish I’d made different choices for her. I’m so afraid to break my own heart that I’m afraid to choose anything at all.
My answer to this month’s question is undeniably FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out, and since I don’t know how to choose one career or friendship or home that I can guarantee myself I’ll be completely happy with later, I haven’t really chosen any – leaving myself in this strange state of limbo that I’m beginning to see has FOMO consequences of its own.
Part of me knows that this fear will always be with me, that I’ll never really be certain I’m doing what’s best, but a new part of me is attempting to really truly believe that wherever I am is where I’m meant to be. Sure, I’m not loving my job right now, but I’m also saving up money to have the time of my life traveling around Europe this spring, not to mention I’ll still have enough to contribute to my retirement accounts. Yes, I haven’t already produced my first feature film, but I have graduated from college with majors I’m proud of. Maybe when I’m 30 I’ll only be an intern for PBS, but I’ll have had 5 more years of adventures to prepare me for it.
When I look back at my life so far, I’m not disappointed in myself, the only thing I KNOW for sure, is that this fear that keeps me from trying new things and putting myself out there will hurt future me, much much more than choosing a path and deciding whether or not to follow it later.
What do I fear? Well, balloons, rapists, and being burnt at the stake definitely make the list. I think at some point I read one too many young-adult first-person narratives about Joan of Arc. However, luckily, most of those fears don’t come up often in my daily life- especially as I do whatever I can to avoid interactions with the dreaded balloon. My daily life instead is ruled by more subtle fears, fears of things like confrontation and disappointing the people I love.
I feel like sometimes having someone important in my life disapproving of me or being angry with me is one of the scariest things I have to face. I worry that this fear keeps me from following my ideals and doing what I know is right. Too often I have sacrificed the truth in order to avoid conflict . It doesn’t help that some people in my life are particularly full of strong opinions, but I would respect myself more if I were better at fighting for what I believe. I know that my friends and family love me, and that they will love me even if I do or think something different from them, so really I shouldn’t worry as much as I do about not rocking the boat. Sometimes rocking the boat is important. And deep inside, I know that. But it is still a really scary thing for me to do.
I am afraid of people. That’s right, my very own species can absolutely terrify me! Potential employers, new students, neighbors I haven’t met yet, bank tellers, taxi drivers, doctors, my husband’s extended family…the list is endless. Of course, I’m not afraid of everyone in the world, but I do get awfully nervous when it comes to starting a conversation, meeting someone new, or entering into an unfamiliar situation.
I blame this tendency on my introverted nature, and the fact that my somewhat-socially-awkward family didn’t force me to get out there and learn how to interact with strangers when I was young. Selling Easter candy and magazine subscriptions door-to-door for the elementary school fundraiser was pure torture…so I often brought along my more loquacious (and adorable) younger brother and made him do the talking. In my adult life making phone calls to the bank or the cable company has been equally stressful, although I’ve made at least some progress in that area (mostly because dealing with Comcast representatives makes me so angry I completely forget my fear).
Mostly, I’m insecure and therefore tend to believe that people won’t like me. It takes me a while to make good friends, like the Princesses, so I dread beginning that process anew. I’ve been dealing with this fear a lot lately. How do I meet people that have things in common with me? If I invite people over, will they come? What if the Principal here has no intention of ever hiring me? Just writing this is stressing me out! I wish I were more outgoing and friendly, but it’s really hard for me. Yep, I’m pretty sure the thought of overcoming this represents my biggest fear in life right now.