I Wear my Rose-colored Glasses at Night...

It never fails that just when I think I've got my life together, I lose it.

It's not that anything extraordinary has happened recently. In fact, I've been on a pretty even keel for a few months now. No grandiose highs, but no excruciating lows either. Sure, I've still got my melodramatic neuroses and frequent life-crises, but nothing too shamble-riffic. For the most part, I like my job, I like my apartment, I have a few friends and a bit of spending money, and I should be set.

So why do I feel kind of empty? Not empty, like all this is meaningless. And not empty, like there's nothing to live for and I'm going to off myself. Just sort of superficially hollow.

Is it the pull of the quickly approaching holidays, long my favorite time of year? Am I getting sentimental in the midst of my ongoing quarter-life crisis (I think it says something about me that I perpetually start out in a state of crisis. For me, generic crisis is the resting point. It's tare.) Whatever it is, I've got to get over it, and FAST. I mean, I've lately even found myself craving the midwest. I know! The midwest! And it's only been 3 months since I was last there. 3 months is not long enought to miss the midwest, especially when one is being fabulous and fun in the big city. 3 years is barely long enough to start missing the midwest. If only family-visit-required holidays only occurred every 3 years. I think I might enjoy them a lot more.

But for some reason, now I'm reflecting sentimentally, like I'm 75 years old and have 6 months left to live, that it's not so bad. And that, to me, is what really is so bad.

Though my life is currently quite pleasant, I'm not content, in a good way. I'm a striver and I'll always be working towards another goal, solving another problem, thinking ahead to the next obstacle that I can beat down with my own bare hands, raw talent, and superior intellect (no sense in false modesty.) This discontent, its existence, is not what's unsettling. It's that always before, I've been looking forward, and suddenly I've come full circle. I've started missing the past.

There are a lot of ways of thought, ways of life that I've left behind. I found them constricting, narrow-minded, and unimaginative. I was, perhaps I am, better than that. But I've started to miss some of the people I left behind. Not my family, who I can't seem to shake no matter what I do, but the friends and peers I walked away from. Sometimes I feel a bittersweet twinge that I don't have any idea what's going on in their lives. I see pictures on Facebook or hear third-hand accounts of people I used to know, even people I used to love, I see their parties, their weddings, their babies, and I'm sad that I'm not a part of any of it anymore. I didn't think I liked these people, didn't think I cared about them, didn't think I'd miss them. And for years I haven't. But like a kid on the playground, sometimes I still feel left out.

I'm not regretting my choices in terms of where my life has taken me. I deserve this life, I've worked hard for it, and I'm overall pleased with it. But I severed a lot of ties in my hurry to get where I am today, and sometimes I wonder if it couldn't have been done with more grace and style and fewer burned bridges.

I share a past with these people, but if we passed each other on the street today, we'd not hardly recognize each other. I can think of one person outside my family who I regularly talk to who I've known for more than 6 years. Everybody I interact with on a day-to-day basis only knows the new me, the (arguably) better me. But I've swung to two extremes over the last decade, from the old me to the new me, and now I'd like to settle somewhere in between. But I've no mirror left, no one who knew me in the old days and knows me in the new, who can help me pick the best pieces of each to find the real me. So like always, I'm going it alone!

Ok, so this is reaaaaaaallly maudlin. I mean, I'm not even a people person. Most of the time, people do nothing but annoy the bejeebus out of me. There's a reason I didn't bring most of these people with me into my future, but something lately has brought out the rose-colored glasses. Remind me to leave those sentimental glasses somewhere I can be certain to step on them or accidentally throw them across the room or leave them at a sushi restaurant and then realize it when I'm halfway back to the office but then not be able to go back and get them because I'm already late for a meeting with my supervisor (all of which have recently happened with 3 different pairs of sunglasses. This is why I never, ever, spend real money on sunglasses. In fact, for a long time, I refused to spend more than $2 for a pair. Thinking myself more mature and responsible, I recently upped the limit to $15. I then promptly destroyed both $15 pairs and am now only allowed to buy sunglasses for $5 from street vendors. End of story.)