8.1

What the fuck am I going to do with my life?

Here are the facts as they stand. I love theatre. Theatre is absolutely my passion. It’s something I’m good at and something that makes me get up in the morning. I don’t laugh so hard my stomach hurts when I figure out a math equation, I don’t sob over legalese. Theatre makes my world stop and it makes my world spin and all that cliched nonsense. But I am also passionate about the Spanish language and culture, International Relations, Medicine, Creative Writing, and all manner of other things. I want to become a neonatal doctor and work in impoverished countries helping babies have a fighting chance. I want to work in the UN or the US Embassy in a country like Costa Rica or Chile. I want to join the Peace Corps. I want to spend my days in black clothes in dark coffee shops smearing ink across a page…. (That’s what writers do, right? I’m just guessing.) I want to spend my days in NYC, living my life and auditioning and studying my craft and performing on Broadway and inspiring other little girls born poor and always pushing at their bones to chase their dreams, because it can happen.

I’m just scared that this isn’t the right path.

I wish someone could come back from the future and let me know what I will be happiest doing. I’ve long since given up hoping to be happy and wealthy, and I’d rather shop at the thrift store for the rest of my days than hate my life. I understand that studying Musical Theatre is a crap-shoot. It’s a dreamers dream. It’s stupid and it’s financially irresponsible and it’s so completely exciting that sometimes I get a little tingly behind my eyeballs when I think about spending hours in a dance studio and studying plays and acting on stages in the biggest city in America. It’s kind of dumb, but I have a hard time feeling any shame when strangers ask me what I’ll be studying in college because while they’re pushing pencils and wearing slacks, I’ll be a starving artist in love with the stage and, to me, that is really romantic-sounding.

And now I’m romanticizing being poor and living off of ramen.

And I don’t care. I have all the time in the world to go to school and study Spanish or International Relations or fight through med school. I’m in the prime of my life right now and this is what I want to do with this supple, energetic body. Ew. That got a little weird. Sorry. My point is that I can go to school at any point, but I’m at the best point of my life to be staying up late and dancing 4 hours a day and main-lining coffee and putting myself out there to be beaten and judged and still be able to keep on keepin’ on.

I’m over the rant. Does anyone else feel like they’re on a speeding train headed toward an 8-pronged proverbial fork in the tracks and you have absolutely NO idea which track you’re supposed to steer the train onto? I need more sleep. I’m headed to the glorious OBGYN in the morning to get blunt objects shot into my arm with a gun so I don’t catch a “nine month parasite”. If you catch my drift.

XOXO Ivy

7.31

I’m a night owl.

I have this weird guilt association with going to bed early. I feel like I’ve missed out on some valuable hours of my life, or like I should be doing something incredible instead of snoring on a mattress. Of course, this is completely ridiculous because the only thing I ever end up doing is watching Netflix until my eyes blur or thinking too much and feeling bad for myself. I have a lot of resentment towards myself and the fact that I don’t go on adventures. I feel that I could be a spontaneous person, a person that would go on adventures and have cool Instagram pictures and wake up the next morning exhausted but fulfilled. I could be this person, I truly believe this. But I’m not, because I don’t have any people to take the cool Instagram pictures or laugh and remember that it happened.

I do not have friends.

The idea of friends, like best-close-forever-always friends, has always completely fascinated me. The girls who never hesitate to name off a BFF. The boys who have a definitive list of people they’d invite on a late-night jaunt. Someone to vent to, someone to call. I don’t know how people get this. Making friends gives me anxiety. I feel that I’m an extrovert that’s trapped inside the body of an insanely shy and self-conscious person. I can chat up a stranger like nobodies business, but the minute it comes down to making friends you’ll hang on to forever, I flop. People keep asking me about the best-close-forever-always friends I’ve been making lately, because “The Friends You Make In College Will Last You Forever”. This news is really upsetting to me. I haven’t made any friends. Not any best-close-forever-always friends. I have acquaintances coming out of my eye sockets. But for me there is no one to call up when I’m feeling adventurous. And I am resentful of this; I am resentful towards myself. This is not a great feeling. I don’t know what the proper equation is for friendship, like I somehow missed that lesson.

New York will be different.

I can feel it. I need it to be different. I need to meet people I feel like I could hang on to forever, people that will drag me out of my bed in the middle of the night to go for a walk or dress up for a party. I want to live fully and not vicariously through Serena Van Der Woodsen on Gossip Girl. I want to be the girl that people ask out on fun adventures and nightly jaunts, and not the girl hearing about them the next day and saying “Oh, thanks for the invite!” like it’s a joke but really feeling an empty echo in my gut because I didn’t get an invite. 

 

Anyways, enough of this pity party. Am I the only one that feels like this? There has to be other people out there without friends. Come to me. I’ll be your friend. I’m an equal-opportunity friender.

 

XOXO Ivy