What’s the point of the list?

I’m twenty-two and a half years old (my birthday is October 2, which makes my starsign Libra. The indecisive one, yes). In the four and a half years since I finished high school, I’ve worked at least a dozen different jobs, enrolled in no less than 6 tertiary programs (from apprenticeships to Bachelor’s degrees), and gained something in the neighbourhood of 25 kilograms (around 50 pounds, for those playing stateside). This is, frankly, not the direction my (academically-inclined, steadily-employed, reasonably-athletic) eighteen-year-old self would have liked to see herself heading.

Also, my eighteen-year-old self did not yet have a grating dependency on parentheses. Curious, that.

Certainly, some good things have emerged from my wanderings off the beaten path. I moved to the very nicest part of a city I love. I live with my (adorable!) boyfriend, who I’m quite willing to admit is far better than I deserve. I finally tracked down a pair of decent mid-heel black pumps in my size. Life is good. But I’m wasting it on crappy jobs and half-finished degrees; too many hours watching TV and eating food that arrives via telephone rather than my kitchen. I am the living, breathing incarnation of this phrase: “youth is wasted on the young.”

Not long ago, I realised that one day very soon I’ll wake up, and I’ll be thirty, and I’ll be doing exactly what I’m doing now - except I’ll be another 50 pounds heavier, most likely. To put it bluntly, this realisation scared the living bejeesus out of me.

I’d had enough of living my days on repeat. And so I came up with this list of everything I want to achieve in the next two and a half years. It’s not exhaustive - I’d like to have a degree well underway, and maybe have bought a home or gotten married. And I want a puppy, goddamnit. But the list is more about the little things I tell myself I’ll do “when I have the time” - because right now, I have nothing but time. I have four months before I can join the mid-year intake of the degree I’ve refused to apply for for the past two years because I thought I wasn’t smart enough. (And I’m applying for that degree tomorrow.) So that’s four months to get a head-start on all my little projects, and another two years to see them through.

Here we go.

2 years ago 

What’s the point of the list?

I’m twenty-two and a half years old (my birthday is October 2, which makes my starsign Libra. The indecisive one, yes). In the four and a half years since I finished high school, I’ve worked at least a dozen different jobs, enrolled in no less than 6 tertiary programs (from apprenticeships to Bachelor’s degrees), and gained something in the neighbourhood of 25 kilograms (around 50 pounds, for those playing stateside). This is, frankly, not the direction my (academically-inclined, steadily-employed, reasonably-athletic) eighteen-year-old self would have liked to see herself heading.

Also, my eighteen-year-old self did not yet have a grating dependency on parentheses. Curious, that.

Certainly, some good things have emerged from my wanderings off the beaten path. I moved to the very nicest part of a city I love. I live with my (adorable!) boyfriend, who I’m quite willing to admit is far better than I deserve. I finally tracked down a pair of decent mid-heel black pumps in my size. Life is good. But I’m wasting it on crappy jobs and half-finished degrees; too many hours watching TV and eating food that arrives via telephone rather than my kitchen. I am the living, breathing incarnation of this phrase: “youth is wasted on the young.”

Not long ago, I realised that one day very soon I’ll wake up, and I’ll be thirty, and I’ll be doing exactly what I’m doing now - except I’ll be another 50 pounds heavier, most likely. To put it bluntly, this realisation scared the living bejeesus out of me.

I’d had enough of living my days on repeat. And so I came up with this list of everything I want to achieve in the next two and a half years. It’s not exhaustive - I’d like to have a degree well underway, and maybe have bought a home or gotten married. And I want a puppy, goddamnit. But the list is more about the little things I tell myself I’ll do “when I have the time” - because right now, I have nothing but time. I have four months before I can join the mid-year intake of the degree I’ve refused to apply for for the past two years because I thought I wasn’t smart enough. (And I’m applying for that degree tomorrow.) So that’s four months to get a head-start on all my little projects, and another two years to see them through.

Here we go.

What’s the point of the list?

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