Hold Your Horses

Settling down. It's become one of the major tensions in my life the last year or so. It's incredibly easy to settle down. Maybe this isn't a universal experience but I find myself settling down over and over again. Meet someone, get comfortable, talk about plans, settle down. And yet, that's the very thing I fled in my exodus from my former life. And here I am again, wildly fighting my own tendency to settle down. It turns out I love change. I have work lined up for my Prince George move that may allow me to make some pretty solid connections with people in Halifax and I can't help but think that that might be a great spot to make my next big move. But then I walk out my front door and am hit in the face by how in love I am with Haida Gwaii and how much I'd like to have kids sometime kinda soon (mum, don't panic). Everyone I know and spend time with is settling down. Looking to buy property mostly, looking for a partner, splitting up with the partner they've realized isn't the settling down one. It's jokingly called the Charlotte Shuffle up here, but when your social circle is, well, the only social circle, swapping partners is inevitable.

It's hard for me to balance my nesting, homebuilding, stasis with this newer excitement and interest in moving and changing and pursuing. It's hard to figure out where the knee-jerk reaction ends and the real preferences begin. The idea of owning a home right now actually makes my skin crawl. The expense, the responsibility, having so much of my financial wealth tied up in one thing...one not-always-so-easy-to-get-rid-of thing. And I remember living in my apartment in Vancouver and wanting so badly to move somewhere else, just somewhere else in the city even. But we were locked in to a property we had a fair bit of responsibility for.

My social circle is composed mostly of people 22-25 and 29-32, so I fall sort of in the middle but often feel pretty old. I don't party as hard all the time, I've got a whack load of education and a pretty good idea of where I'd like to go with it. And yet when it comes to doing the 'grown-up' things I'm way behind. Like a hopeless 20 year-old who's headed where ever the wind will take her.