Just one day at a time.

NPR: School Debt A Long-Term Burden For Many Graduates

This article stirred up all kinds of thoughts, and I almost fell down the quarter-life-crisis-rambling-thought rabbit hole, again. Lord, I’m tired of this, “what happened to Plan A?” internal strife that I feel every few months. Maybe this is what a parent is, but I feel like every quarter-lifer should be paired up with a mid-lifer so that both people can simultaneously look into the past/future to recognize that, no, you will never “figure it out” because not a single person in the world has a clue what “it” is. (Perhaps with an exception for the Dalai Lama.) Life is not one “it,” yes? There are a lot of “it’s” and we should be so lucky to discover what those are along the way. The more the merrier, I say.

At first I was going to add my lamentations on how my school loan debt is going to prevent me from “reaching my goals” and “moving forward.” But what do those mean? Yes, I will never be able to save for a down payment on the Colonial-style home I dreamt about. And I am very behind on my first-of-five-kids-at-24 schedule. But had I not gone to grad school, I would never have met some of the closest friends that I have now, I wouldn’t have gone to the Philippines to live and work, and I probably wouldn’t have found my way to San Francisco as quickly as I did.

I think this falls back onto my desire to go to therapy, but increasingly I realize that I don’t recognize or haven’t heard my internal voice. And I can’t distinguish what I truly want from what I’ve been nurtured to believe that I should want. But I need that clarity before I can move onto any next phase of life. So instead, I'm going to cherish what I’ve collected from my life path thus far, rather than bemoan where I’ve fallen short on the “supposed to” checklist.