What would I do without livejournal?

I guess today is one of those three-entry days.

Sometimes I think better in the shower.

I sat down and wrote a letter to him last week (of course I never intend to send it). The funny thing is, I started it the morning before I got his email. I finished it the morning after I got his email, and it was full of all the things I would say if we sat down face-to-face in a perfect universe. Here is what I would say if we sat down face-to-face in THIS universe. "I want to be friends. You mean so much to me, and I want so badly for you to be a part of my life. I think we can be friends, and I'll do everything in my power to be a good friend. I hope that, in five or six or ten years, you can forgive me, and that someday, when the stars are better aligned, you could consider giving me a third chance. But in the meantime, I just want your friendship, and all I offer you is mine."

I wonder what he'd say, or if he'd believe me, or if he'd somehow slip into that perfect universe and say something ridiculous.

I feel like I've been living outside of myself for the last 15 months. Or even longer. Like I've been sort of looking down on myself, making decisions that seem rational as a third party. I haven't made first-person decisions in so long... Didn't I decide I wasn't going to go to grad school? Didn't I decide to take a year off, unless I got into UCSF? Wasn't I more focused on the "year off" than the "UCSF"? When did someone else step in and decide that taking a year off was a bad idea? When did that person decide that moving to Connecticut and leaving behind everything I hold dear would be a good idea?
In the last four days, I've begun to feel like myself again. I feel like I slipped back into my own body and finally have control over my own decisions. It's a wonderful, glorious feeling. The main problem is that things are nearly unrecognizable. My life is unrecognizable. These aren't the things I wanted; this isn't the life I wanted. So the question is what to do now...? Do I continue on and make the best of this situation I somehow created for myself? Or, since I feel like my real self for the first time in who knows how long, do I try to backtrack and recreate the path I would have taken had I been sane when I left the trail?

I would have taken a year off. I would have stayed in Santa Cruz and gotten a ridiculous job I would have hated. Tech work, maybe. Santa Cruz Biotech, making antibodies. I would have made no money, had to start paying my loans back, lost my annuity, and been so poor I would have panicked about money all the time. I would have treated him better and held onto him and we would have done well together. After the year off, I would have re-applied to graduate schools, or maybe I would have deferred UCSF, and I would have started at UCSF this fall, doing rotations but knowing I'd join the Blackburn lab. Maybe it's too much to pretend that he would be at Berkeley in physics; maybe he'd need a year off too. Maybe things wouldn't be okay between us. I think the main issue in this scenario is that I would have done what I WANTED instead of what I thought was GOOD for me. I shouldn't have come to grad school because I thought I was SUPPOSED to. Part of me wanted to, yes, and I do love Yale, but I think I really would have benefited from taking some time off to calm down and collect myself and be young and stupid. You can only cram so much young and stupid into your first year of graduate school. It's just too busy and requires just too much responsibility.

That's another thing. I'm worried I'm too much of a child. Is that why no one else loves me? I can't keep my apartment clean; I can't cook; I don't know a thing about my own car. I'm a child in a graduate student's body, and each is wondering how it got stuck with the other.

There's a huge artistic side to me, hiding just beneath the dorky exterior. Maybe I wasn't kidding when I joked about deferring grad school to live in a box in San Francisco and paint. Maybe I can't paint, but the sentiment might have been accurate. Knitting has been a huge outlet for me, a chance to make things and be creative. Emily told me last night that I was always knitting the most interesting things--wire heart boxes, super soft shawls with no pattern, slugs. It was, oddly enough, possibly the most meaningful compliment I've ever gotten. It was the kind of off-hand comment that hits some sort of internal target. I was astonished and very proud of myself. I AM creative, and I DO make neat things. I'd never thought about that before; I always considered myself bad with arts and crafts; I can't even draw a straight line, and I can't sew to save my life. But anyone can knit, and my mental creativity is enough to give me some sort of artistic outlet.

I know a lot of this doesn't really make sense. I know I'm sort of rambling. I just feel like (as usual) there are so many things going on inside my head all at once. He's a huge part of it, but there are other things too. My own identity and my role in the universe, to name a few. Could I really drop out and open a flower shop? Could I drop out and open a yarn store? I don't know the first thing about business, but I know that my obsessive nature would be perfect for running either kind of store. I'd learn everything about my products and would force them lovingly on customers. I'd be the kind of friendly interactive shopkeeper you find in small towns. Like Santa Cruz. Or even New Haven.
And in my spare time I'd read everything under the sun, and listen to NPR, and start writing the novel I've been wanting to work on since the fourth grade.

Or maybe I was supposed to do what Ann's doing, and get a Ph.D. in marine biology or oceanography and not genetics. I could have gone out on boats and learned to sail (better) and to dive and I would have had that job that makes people say, "Don't you wish you had her job?"

Does everyone feel like this?