It’s often said people move down to Key West because they are running away from something or running towards something. It’s never too hard to tell. Often the people with Keys Disease, some sort of addiction they are working through or completely consumed by, are the ones running away from something. While the rest of us, running around trying to get the most out of living life on the fringes of reality are running towards something. Upon moving here and for the last 5 years of my life, I always knew I was running, but was I running away from somewhere, something or was I running toward somewhere, something?
The past 2 weeks, I’ve been focusing on giving my blog a little facelift. Inevitably in this process, I’ve read over some posts, noticed themes, and patterns. The biggest themes/patterns I’ve noticed are for the past 15 years, but especially the past 2 I’ve felt like I’m struggling. Like I’m constantly swimming upstream against the current, not getting anywhere. It’s a feeling I can’t seem to shake. The other thing I’ve noticed, I start most of my blogs off apologizing that I haven’t written in a while.
The latter is an easy fix, start writing more. Reality start posting more blogs. Stop worrying so much about everything lining up and being perfect, people judging me for what I am saying and write what I feel. I started this blog to write out my true, authentic, vulnerable feelings on a regular basis to help me connect with others. To help us all feel a little less alone. When I get a response from someone about my blog, either saying “they’ve been there too” or “I thought it was only me” those are the reasons I write. That’s the connection I’m searching for here. Because in this world of hustle and bustle, the main thing I think a lot of us are looking for is just a little connection. When we realize we aren’t the only ones thinking, feeling, seeing life the way we do it connects us. It helps us feel less alone. Lonely is the hardest feeling I’ve ever felt, and I hope to help others through that as much as possible. After all, I said when I first started this blog, if I could make one person feel less alone, I would feel accomplished. The only way to do that is to write more about the life I’m learning to live through.
My bigger issue, always feeling like life is an uphill battle, isn’t as easy to solve. Afterall, I link struggling in life to being a hard worker, and being a hard worker is where I was taught to find value, find my worth to society. While this lesson was instilled into me by my close family, it’s also a societal lesson we have all been taught. It’s the American dream after all, if you work hard enough, long enough you can buy yourself enough to have the American dream. You can buy yourself the freedom to live life the way you desire. That’s what we are all working towards after all right?
How do we get there?
Simple, have a plan. Decide early on in your life what you’re going to do for the rest of it, make a plan, follow the plan. That way you can insure by the time your 40, no later than 50 you are living the American dream, designed by you.
I did this. I listened to all of this. I made a plan. Not a plan that would one day make me rich, but would allow me to do some pretty cool shit along tropical coast lines until I was ready to retire comfortably. It really was a great plan, easy to follow. In undergrad when all my friends were trying to hone in on their specific major, I had my major. I never wavered from my major. Instead I refined my path throughout undergrad by deciding the field of study I wanted to go into within marine science. Thus, post-graduation when all my friends were figuring out how they were going to use the degree they got, I went off to the coast to save the tuna. That was my plan. My plan got me to my next step graduate school studying exactly the species I desired, Bluefin Tuna.
Summarizing 10 years of my life in a brief, succinct paragraph makes it seem as though everything was easy breezy as life flowed from one check point to another. It’s funny when we give the highlights, that’s exactly what they are…highlights. The highlights don’t tell you about the fear around not being smart enough to get into graduate school. Trying for 2+ years before I actually got an offer on April 1 of 2014, and sincerely believing it was an elaborate April fool’s joke and waiting til April 2nd to confirm with my future advisor that it wasn’t. It doesn’t tell you about all the rejections I received from graduate advisors that got me to the one that finally said yes, or the 30+ cover letters I wrote to potential employers that went completely unacknowledged. All points I made to my sister when she would make a jab at me over the holiday meal about how easy my life had been. How everything was simply handed to me. How easy my life had always been, my life had been nothing but easy. How dare she say my life had been easy, if my life had been easy that meant I didn’t deserve it because I hadn’t worked for it. If my life had somehow flowed up until graduate school, I refused to look at it that way because then I would’ve been less deserving of the life I had created.
In graduate school, it all changed. If anyone ever thought my life had been so easy, by the end of graduate school they knew differently. Working under a narcissistic man will do that to you. Life got extremely hard for no reason.
So, at the end of my graduate degree, I left. I ran away from the life I had created. I ran away from anything that resembled a plan of a future.
Yet still being ingrained to plan, I began chasing after my next big career path. If you had asked me at any moment what I was doing, I would’ve told you the life I wanted. The life I was running towards. Even if that life got redirected 4 times over the past 5 years.
When moving down to Key West, as soon as I was asked which category I fell into I never once hesitated. I was absolutely running towards something. Becoming a writer was the dream. Finding a career that would sustain me down here living the Keys life while I wrote my book, that was the goal. I made a plan in order to do that. I found a place to live, before I even moved down here. I found work within 2 weeks of moving down here. I found more work. I signed my first annual lease in the past 10 years of my life. I found the job I thought would sustain me with only working 5 days a week. On paper, it was all working out. In reality, I was still running.
Over the past 5 years, there is no doubt from anyone who knows me. I’ve been running. Always looked for something. Yet I’ve never slowed down long enough to figure out where I was running, or what was driving me. While writing my third draft of this post, yes that’s right my third draft. This being my fourth. There are times magic happens and the first draft flows out of me effortlessly other times writing is a process. My writing process regularly consists of at least two types of “rough drafts.” The first I spill out my guts and am way too wordy. The second I get straight to the point. No fluff, no flare. Typically, on the third I’ve got something. This time it took a fourth draft, because somewhere in the middle of the third, I realized all these years I had no plan of what I was running towards because in reality I was running away from the life I created in my 20’s. By the end of my 20’s I got severely burnt out. I needed a break. I needed to slow down. After a solid decade of running, working towards a career I was so certain of, I didn’t know how to slow down. I didn’t know how to stop running. Thus, I kept the momentum in any direction that seemed like a good idea. I thought if I kept running towards anything but marine science, the hopelessness, the loneliness, the depression I faced at the end of that career couldn’t catch up to me.
Over the last 2 months, I’ve realized I need to stop. I need to slow down. I tried to do it here. I tried to make the space I needed to grow. Yet with the growing debt I’ve accumulated over the last 6 months, slowing down when you have bills to pay isn’t realistic.
Thus, I’ve made the hard decision to leave Key West. Go home, regroup, and ground myself. Truly work on things that light my soul on fire, as opposed to finding the job that pays the bills. I’m sure it won’t feel easy, yet I’m hoping at the end of it, life will be easier. I hope to finally leave the life of struggle to define my worth behind, and embrace a new way to define who I am.
This is a hard post for me to write. It’s the reason I’ve rewritten it so many times. Leaving Key West, even with every intention to return once life looks a little more certain financially, feels like I’m failing. Going home to heal my wounds, feels like I’m giving up. Like everyone who ever said I seemed lost or was floundering, was right. That’s hard. That hurts. Yet maybe it’s true.
Maybe I have just been floundering all along from one solution to the next. Yet now it’s time to change. After all you can’t be lost when you go home. You can’t be flounder when you’re standing still.
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