The Prospect of Death

Throughout my life I have experienced death multiple times. My experiences however, were limited to great aunts or uncles I barely knew and grandparents who had been suffering. Whenever death has occurred in my life I have seen it coming. With my grandparents, although I really loved them, part of me was happy when they passed away because their suffering had finally ended.

Recently, I received news that a person in my life was involved in a terrible accident and may not make it. It has been really hard for me to comprehend my feelings. She is an amazing person and I have really enjoyed the time I have spent with her but when I received the news I just went numb. I wanted to cry for her like everyone else but I just couldn't understand that this was actually happening. I had just seen her a couple of days ago so I just couldn't think of her as anything but happy and healthy. At first I wasn't that upset by the news because in my mind she was going to be okay and soon I'd get to go visit her in the hospital. As I heard more people talking about it I started to realize how real the possibility was that she may not make it through this.

Talking about the incident makes it hard for me to put on a brave face and fight back the tears. Never before has something this unexpected happened and never to someone so young. Thinking about it makes me mad and regretful. I know there is nothing that could have been done differently, in hindsight you think of all the ways it could have been prevented but in actuality bad things happen and there's no way of stopping it. What is done is done and now all I can do is think positive thoughts and hope that she will make it out of this okay. If however things get worse, I will be prepared for that too. None of this is fair and nothing like this ever should have happened but it did. As wonderful of a person she is, I cannot stop terrible things from happening. All I hope is her family will be able to get through this difficult time and that by some miracle she can go on to live a long happy life.

The Neverending Battle With Anxiety

Most of the time I like to think I'm doing great handling my anxiety. I have never been to a doctor or spoken to a therapist but I've discovered what my triggers are and have undergone my own exposure therapy to help it go away. But then I come home after a trip to visit my boyfriend's family and start crying when he tells me his family thought I was distant.

I like to think I'm doing well but I'm not. I want to go to therapy and have someone to talk to but I can't afford $100 a session and insurance doesn't cover it. Sometimes I get close to opening up to my boyfriend about how anxiety affects me but I don't want to rely on him for my emotional needs so I explain it as my personal issues and leave it at that. Having him talk to me about his family feeling unable to talk to me and thinking I was unhappy and uncomfortable during the trip hurt me. Not because of what he said but the fact that these kinds of issues just won't go away. I don't think I've made a new friend since I was 16 and I'm 22 now. I just seem to have this inability to connect with new people and I just can't converse like a normal human. I wanted so badly for his parents to like me because I didn't make the best impression the first time. I felt great coming home from the trip, I felt like I fit in with the family more but when my boyfriend talked to me it felt like I was delusional the whole time. How I felt and how others felt was so different, it crushed me.

I don't know how to talk to people. I thought it was just starting conversations I had trouble with but maybe I have trouble keeping them going too. I wish I could be the perfect daughter-in law, helping out around the house, telling funny stories, bonding over shared hobbies but I guess I'm just the girl his family secretly hopes he breaks up with.

My boyfriend and I have had a special bond from the first day we met. Usually I'm super quiet on first dates so much so that my ex-boyfriend used to tell me it was my turn to talk and would not say a word to me until I started a conversation, that didn't work very well... With my current boyfriend it was a little awkward at the beginning but as we started to walk around and talk more, everything came so easily. When I talk to him it feels like I can say whatever I want without judgement. I don't need to second guess everything I want to say because he has always understood what I was saying and was receptive to my thoughts. That first day with him showed me everything I needed to know and from that moment on I knew I never wanted anyone else. Unfortunately this was one of the only times I've bonded with someone right away.

In school I would spend the first half of the year trying to form friendships and only got a couple of months to enjoy my friends before the summer came and went and I was yet again placed in a new class where I had no friends. You'd think with how often I was forced to make new friends that I wouldn't have a problem with social anxiety but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. In my school years I had big falling outs with my best friends that made me distrust friendship. I desperately wanted friends but I wanted friends that would be there for me forever not ones that would leave me because I wasn't good enough for them. To me it was all or nothing and since I couldn't have all I choose nothing. I'd hoped it would be something I'd grow out of as I got older but it didn't happen. In my first year of university I tried really hard to be friendly but yet again people were only my friends for class and when class ended they were gone. So I stopped trying and hoped that if I was meant to have friends it would just happen at some point. But here I am going into my last year of university and I'm still friendless.

At this point I really want to start improving myself and learning how to properly cope with my anxiety. However, without access to a therapist I worry that I'm stuck this way forever. At this point I don't even know who I am without the anxiety. I'm used to being a mess of a person. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be normal.

My Anxiety Makes Me Feel Crazy

Ever since I've started University I've felt like I've had my anxiety under control. I've realized lately that my anxiety isn't gone, it's just showing itself in ways I've never experienced before.

In the past, I've experienced anxiety in new situations whether that be unfamiliar places or unfamiliar people. The symptoms I experienced were uncontrollable shaking, heart racing, inability to think, and general uneasiness. Now I experience anxiety when there's a break in my routine or something I expect to happen doesn't. The symptoms I get now are heart racing, worrying, and crying. I hate how my anxiety makes me feel because it happens most often in situations involving my boyfriend and I don't want to be that overdramatic girlfriend who cries to get what she wants, even if I know that's not why I'm doing it. It wasn't until an anxiety attack I had quite recently after a miscommunication, where I heard my boyfriend saying he was coming over on a certain day and then on that day he didn't come over, that I realized I wasn't being an awful person it was just my anxiety acting up.

I think the realization that I'm not being crazy or unreasonable and that it's my anxiety that is causing me to react strongly helps me to calm down when I'm in those situations. When it happened and I thought I was just crazy, the attack would go on for hours until I either cried myself to sleep or distracted myself with something else. Now that I can think a bit more rationally about what is causing my reactions I can calm myself down a lot faster. I think taking the blame, guilt, shame, etc away from my anxiety attacks has made a big difference in how I can handle them. I'm currently still trying to find new coping techniques but for now, I've learned not to give myself such a hard time when I experience an anxiety attack.

How is it possible to miss someone who is so close?

When my boyfriend and I were long distance I can honestly say I didn't miss him too much. The first four months were easy because we were still getting to know each other and the connection was building up so I didn't really miss him. He came to visit after that and once he left I missed him a ton for like a month. However, once I got used to him not being there the next three months were fairly easy, I missed him but it was manageable. The last month of our long distance relationship I missed him like crazy because I knew he was coming soon and I just wanted time to move faster.

Now we've been in a normal relationship for about six months and I feel like I miss him more now than I did when we were long distance. I get to see him about three times a week which is realistically the perfect amount of time together but in my heart, I always want more. If I could live unrealistically I would move in with him so I get to see him every day and always wake up beside him. I know that living together doesn't make sense right now as our relationship is still fairly new (just over a year) and we can't do it financially. He's so close now that I could see him every day if I wanted to yet going even a sad without seeing him makes me miss him. I feel crazy for being sad when he goes home because I know I'll see him again in a couple of days anyway. I never knew I could miss someone so much who is so close.

Every day before I see him I get so excited. I fall asleep that night happy, knowing I get to see him the next day. No matter how bad of a day I might have it's all worth it because at the end of the day I get to see him again. This happens even if I saw him the previous day meaning that I miss him even if it's only been about 36 hours since I last saw him. I've always been a person who likes my space and personal time so it's weird to me that I want to be around another person this much. I'm really thankful that I got to meet someone who makes me feel this way because it's times like these when I realize just how much I love him.

Timing Is Bullsh*t

I remember being fifteen years old and experiencing my first heartbreak. I had said goodbye to a boyfriend I still really liked because I knew we weren't working at that point in time. I reassured myself that if we were meant to be we would be. He had told me that maybe we'd meet again later in life. I held out hope that our timing had been wrong and we'd get it right the next time. Later I learnt that the timing was exactly what it was supposed to be.

I don't believe that the timing of things is ever wrong. Some people like to complain that they met people at the wrong times and that if only the timing had been right, it would have worked. I used to be one of those people who liked to blame things on timing. As I've gotten older and experienced more of what time has shown me, I've learnt that it's never wrong.

When I was nineteen I had a summer fling. I was smitten with the guy and hoped the relationship would become something more but it never did. He broke up with me after a month and in order to "one up" him, I started searching for new guys right away. Little did I know how perfect the timing of that break up was but when it happened I wished he hadn't given up on us so early.

One week after being broken up with I met who I currently call the love of my life. As I met him and got to know him I became thankful for the timing of my previous relationship because had it not happened exactly the way it did, I wouldn't have met him. Our circumstances weren't great since we lived on opposite sides of the country. In the beginning, I was just gonna call our meeting bad timing but it was exactly the right timing. We pulled towards each other despite all the obstacles saying the timing was bad. I was too young, we were too far away, long distance was too hard; all these things shouted no to anyone else but to us, there was no answer but yes. Our timing shouldn't have been great but it was. Since things lined up so perfectly for us to come into each other's lives, I can't ever believe that bad timing is the reason a relationship doesn't work out.

Your relationship doesn't fail because of bad timing, it fails because it wasn't the right relationship.

I'm In A Serious Relationship

A couple of months ago I wrote a post called "I want to be committed but not serious" in which I expressed my ideas on commitment vs seriousness in a relationship. I claimed I wanted to be committed but not serious because I was twenty years old and too young to be serious.

I did not want to make plans far in the future, spend my weekends gardening, think seriously about marriage, spend evenings thinking of baby names, etc. However, somehow I've gotten into a serious relationship without even realizing it. I'm now planning trips with my boyfriend months ahead, I'm growing a garden with him at my house, and I'm sure I want to marry him one day. We haven't talked about baby names but we have talked about how we want to be great parents one day.

When I wrote the post I know it came from being afraid. I loved him but I didn't know if we had a future together yet since he hadn't moved to my city yet. Things were still new and scary, the last thing I wanted was to be hurt so I tried to protect myself by claiming I didn't want to be "serious". After spending just a couple of months with him, my feelings have changed a lot. Now we have celebrated our one year anniversary together and I'm going to meet his parents in the winter, I'm not scared of whether or not we have a future. For right now I love him and I can't imagine a point in my life when I won't. I want to be a "boring" couple with him and do serious couple things because I am serious about him.

Future Career

In just a couple of weeks, I will be back at university starting my third year. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do post-university. I'm taking my degree for five years so I still have three years before I make a solid decision. As much as I'd like to find a biology related job, I've also been thinking a lot about teaching lately.

In high school, I was part of a peer tutoring club for two years. I really enjoyed helping younger students with their homework and teaching them about the subjects they struggled in. I've also always loved kids and enjoyed every babysitting opportunity I got. If I made the decision right now, I'd probably go for a post-degree so I could be a teacher, I'm not sure about elementary vs high school though. I think both elementary and high school would be enjoyable but in different ways.

On the other hand, I don't want to give up completely on biology. My original plan for trying to get into the biology field was to start volunteering for biology related places in my fourth or fifth year to build up a bit of experience. From there I would apply to related jobs after graduating but if I fail to get a job in the first couple of years then I would work part time while still doing volunteering. The problem with biology is that I'm not completely sure what I want to do with it. I don't know what direction I want to take or what kind of job I'm wanting. The reason teaching is more appealing right now is that I can imagine exactly what I want in that field but in biology I'm unsure.

There is no rush to make a decision right now but as I finish up my degree, I think I'll make sure I meet the requirements for teaching so I still have that option. Regardless of what I ultimately choose, I just want to find a job that will make me happy.