Outside Looking In

I was sitting on my patio in my apartment complex after a long day and noticed a cute old couple carrying in their groceries across the parking lot. This made me wonder what a cute old couple is doing living in an apartment complex. Then I thought to myself, "I hope they don't live on the third floor. I have enough trouble struggling up the never ending flights of stairs just to get to my front door, and I am only 25!"

When I am a cute old person carrying in my groceries, I imagine myself in a nice little one-story home with a white picket fence and a vegetable garden in the back yard that includes green beans, tomatoes, and turnips. Okay so maybe I have thought about this a little too much, but I know that I would not want to live in an apartment complex with neighbors that never sleep and dogs that bark all through the night so that you can never sleep. Not to mention the trek down to the mailbox just to find a never ending pile of coupons for products you have never heard of and will never buy in addition to the previously stated struggle up the stairs. I do love my apartment complex, but I look at it as a start to my professional life, not the end.

I live in an apartment because it is practical and because I cannot afford a house right now. I also live in an apartment because I do not know where I am going to end up in the next year and putting a down payment on a house I may never live in would be senseless. But then I realized that maybe living in an apartment complex is practical for that cute old couple and maybe they cannot afford a nice little one-story home with a white picket fence and a vegetable garden. Or maybe they just want to live here.

Either way, I am just an outsider looking in on their life, well I am just their neighbor sitting on my patio. But just because my idea of growing old is a very specific, it is just my idea and does not mean what is right for me is right for everyone else. Now if only I can remember that for other aspects of my life.

Howdy Ya'll

It is kind of ironic how I ended up in the great state of Texas. Never in my life had I dreamed of moving from my little hometown of Alliance, Ohio, let alone half way across the country to this strange place called Texas. But sometimes life takes you on a ride and all you can do is put your hands up and scream at the top of your lungs as you come down the first hill.

I was a psychology major at Kent State and knew that I needed to go to grad school. By this time I was interested in school psychology and looking into programs in Northeast Ohio. I has a mild thought process that I would like to move out of state and see new places, but knew that I was too scared to leave on my own. Luckily there was this great guy who also wanted to go to school out of state.

We knew each other for a few years and had been dating for a few months before we were forced to make decisions together that would change the rest of our lives and decide our fate. This went surprisingly well considering we decided to blindly jump head first into the shallow end of a drained swimming pool.

We decided to apply to grad school and move out of state together. (Crazy, I know!) So we researched schools that had school psychology programs. We found schools that were close together so we could live together and commute to school. It was a long shot, but we thought it could work. We had an amazing fail proof back up plan of working in the fast food industry if school didn't work out. So we applied to schools all over the country in hopes we would get in.

To our surprise, two schools we applied to in Denton, Texas accepted our sorry souls, not knowing what they were getting themselves into. Then they were stuck with us for the next three years. Now we are both on internship and have lived in Texas for the past two years. I am so glad that I made the move and had this experience. But I am more grateful to the people that have helped me get here. I never could have done this without that great guy who took a leap with me or without all of my amazing family and friends that I have (the ones back in Ohio and the ones that I have made here).

At the beginning of all this, I had no big dreams to move to a particular place and had no expectations for how it would go. It was a little scary at first but I realized that sometimes it is best to let life take you where it wants you to go. So get on that ride, put your hands up, scream at the top of your lungs as you come down that first hill, but know that you will come down and everything will be A-Okay!