its now or never

I keep saying I have tons more to write about but that it will have to wait and then I never get around to it. Ergo, here I am at 12:30 in the AM after baking nearly 10 dozen chocolate chip cookies for my students, exhausted and all allergy-y, and realizing that I still have tons to say, but no time to say it in because I desperately need sleep tonight.

I'll boil it down to this: My life has finally stabilized. And not stabilized in the sense that for the last two years everything has been really up in the air and it has all finally settled down with the completion of graduate school, but stabilized in the sense that life has finally settled down, period. For the first time I feel like I have actually arrived at something that might actually resemble my future. I received a stellar education, have a fantastic job, am dating the most incredible man in the world, and I'm happy.

And again, not happy in the sense of like, yay I have a job and a boyfriend, but happy in the sense that I am doing what I love and what I want to do for my whole life and have found the person that I want to spend that whole life with. For serious.

My life has always just felt like getting over one hurdle after another, always anticipating what was coming next and knowing that something else was always coming next. I finished high school and looked ahead to college. I finished college and looked ahead to student teaching, I finished student teaching and looked ahead to graduate school. And now I'm done with graduate school and I have a career. Like, this isn't going to change in a year because I'm moving or because I'm graduating or because I get into university. I'm a teacher. It's my job and I love it and I'm not leaving.

I'm still not quite used to it. I still feel a little bit like a kid, or at least an undergrad. But I'm 24. 24! I have my own health insurance and I pay my own rent and when my car breaks down, well crap, I have to take care of it. But it's life now. My life. Not the life I live with the generous aid of my parents. Not the life I live while I'm figuring out what to do with my future. My own, real life. And it's good.

Sometimes I wonder what I did to deserve it all, but I figure I'd better not push my luck.