I am (going to be) a total failure

It is supposed to storm tonight.  I wish that it would.  Sunny days grate on my nerves.  When it is nice out, I feel like I should, you know, leave the house or something.  I feel shitty if I do not get out.  When it rains, I feel perfectly justified in shunning the outside world.

I hope my neighbors find my Beethoven as annoying as I find their screaming children.

I read about something called a “quarter-life crisis.”  It is the experience of being in your mid-twenties and feeling like an utter failure.  As if you have failed to meet the goals that you should have by this point in life, and like everyone else is doing better than you are.  It is good to know that I am not the only person who feels this way, I guess.

Except I really am a failure.  I am 24 years old, I have two bachelor’s degrees, and yet I am working for $9.00/hour at a job I loathe.  People who never went to college are making 2-3 times more than I do.  I have a friend who made over $50,000 last year, and she is not a college graduate.  I am getting ready to go back to school to get yet another bachelor’s degree, which may prove less useless than the two pieces of shit I’ve gotten thus far, but I’m still basically doing what I should have done when I was 18.  I have completely wasted 6 years of my life.

I might be out of school by the time I am 30.  God, I’m such a fucking loser. 

The WORST part, though, is that I am going to move home and do my pre-veterinary work at the same university I left 4 years ago, taking more-or-less the same classes that I took 4 years ago, with the same professors from 4 years ago.  With a bunch of 18-year-old children. 

Everyone always assumed that because I was good at everything, I would have no problems in life.  I would go to college and a wonderful life would just fall into my lap.  So I never got career counseling, or advice, or anything.  It’s my fault, of course.  I was always so sure I knew what I was doing.

It’s un-American to not make money.  In fact, it is downright evil.

I just hate the knowing looks, the pity, the condescension.  “Oh, she couldn’t hack it as X, so now she’s going home with her tail between her legs.”

No one is ever going to consider me a real person until I make more than 10k a year with benefits.  Something that I will probably never do because I’m just a giant fucking joke.

“Money isn’t important…but we’re all going to judge you by how much you make.” 

I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time.  I mean, good things came out of the last 6 years, I guess, but mostly it was pointless.  Because I’m just going exactly back to square one.

I don’t think I’ll be able to tolerate living so close to my parents again.  Or living in that shitty, small town.  Stuck going to college with the rejects from the local high school.  “Aren’t you done with school YET?”  While the people I graduated with pump my gas and wait my table and still somehow find room to judge. 

Oh, and there’s absolutely nothing in terms of mental health resources, unless I want to go to the shrink I went to when I was 16…who did nothing at all to help me.

But what choice do I have?  NONE.  What I want doesn’t matter.  I must go home, I must go live with my sister because she pays my bills.  Even if it means living somewhere I can’t find a decent job, where I am overqualified for every single position listed in the paper.  Even if it means living somewhere I loathe. 

“I don’t really want to move home,” I said.

“I’m sure it won’t be that bad,” she replied.  “After all, we will have more money, and it will be less boring.”

I will be 25, attending the same college I did when I was 18 and working at the same shitty fast food job, because that’s all there is.  This is your life when you’re a failure.  I might be established here, and I might not be a total failure here¸ but that won’t matter when I move.  When I move back, it will be because I am a failure.  The act of moving will complete the transformation.