6/6/23: Living ALone

Hello again, everyone! I became acutely aware I haven’t made a blog post in quite a while and so I decided I better get on that. My life has changed quite rapidly in the past few months. I graduated high school, am going to finish my associate’s degree at a community college, and…moved out of my parent’s home! I’m currently renting a house out in the country and attempting to adult? I’ve heard many adults say things like “Oh, you’ll have to get used to adulting soon!” and I cringe. Every. Single. Time. How Buzzfeed millennial 2014 of them. I won’t divulge too much other information about my current situation because…I don’t like oversharing on the internet?

But here’s what you need to know about this house and what I have recently learned about it as well! It is around 150 years old. Yeah. And being that old there’s probably been a lot of dead people in it. Yay! Hopefully, none of them became ghosts or whatever and decided to stay behind because I would make them pay rent. If there are any supernatural occurrences, I must break out my old incense from my witch phase when I was 12, and this will become a very different type of blog post. Will this become a new version of the Amityville Horror? It is in my best interests to hope that it won’t. This becomes even more pertinent after my cat clock randomly fell off the wall and its eyes fell out. If this were a book being analyzed by my high school English teacher then she would’ve gone crazy over the symbolism. My mundane brain thinks that the adhesive on the command strip didn’t adhere correctly.

Moving has confronted me with one particularly distasteful characteristic of myself.

I own too many clothes
I own too many knickknacks
I own too much makeup
I own too much

I should probably lighten up how much I own within the next few years, as I would wager that I will be moving around somewhat frequently in my young adulthood? I never wanted to be someone that owned so much, but when you only live in one place for so long and have a tendency to just spend and spend, it becomes a habit. I will say that I have much less than I did a few years ago, but I can’t help but feel bad every time I drop stuff off at Goodwill. Overconsumption plagues me, and I try to be a more mindful consumer now. The issue with that is that now that the switch in my brain has been flipped to want to declutter, I feel terrible that I bought so much stuff and am just giving it away again in the first place. I overconsumed, so now I give it away to probably end up in a landfill as a result, but I can’t live in a place with so much stuff.

Another issue I’ve encountered is coming to terms with the fact that without school, I have almost nothing to do. It’s bizarre because I used to love summer and had that pressure of knowing that I would have to go back to school 5 days a week again. Now, I don’t have to do anything besides work. There is almost nothing I am committed to. I don’t have any more classes until college starts in the fall, and I am confronted with the reality that I have to prevent myself from rotting my brain on my phone or media consumption. And it will just be like this. Forever. There is nothing at the end of summer to stop me from doing anything. I’m doing online college courses as well, so if my personal resolve isn’t good enough to keep up and not be a layabout, I don’t have the threat of not graduating as I did with high school because I’m not required to go to college. That really scares me, so I will try to upkeep my hobbies to prevent brain rot.

I now have the complete opposite problem of people who live in cities and move to the country. They find that it’s eerily quiet at night. I have lived in the country all my life, and thankfully this house is no different. Unfortunately, it is right next to the highway and I am a light sleeper whose childhood bedroom was in a fully finished basement for 15 years of my life. I would go to school and hear kids talk about being kept up by some crazy storm last night. Me? I didn’t even know it rained until I went upstairs that morning. My body should get used to the new noises outside at night, but we will see how long that will take.

Overall, I’m fairly excited about living alone. I’ve always been an introverted person who spent a lot of time by myself. However, I never realized how creepy it is to be in a big house alone. I come from a house with many people coming and going, and now it's just me. Oh well. The main thing I have to worry about right now is getting curtains for the windows. There’s nothing between me and whatever is lurking in the darkness of the countryside except a thin pane of glass…. But I’m just being dramatic with my overactive imagination. The only thing that truly is out there is some raccoons and a groundhog that took up residence in a shed on the property. Terrifying. The Midwest isn’t exactly known for its cryptids or creepy folklore, unlike Appalachia, which is a shame. Luckily, this new atmospheric setting should be good brain food for writing inspiration. God knows I need to actually write more. Now I sound like one of those tortured writers in horror movies who move to some weird house that is obviously haunted and keep telling their family the move will be "good for them" and then they all die at the end.

-Vi