Depressing Rant

I've been more than a bit of a malcontent lately. I just feel ... trapped. Stagnant. Stunted. Restrained. You get the drift. I'm frothing at the mouth for something to happen, something that will move me forward, but I just keep sitting in the same damned place. And every day I do the same things and go the same places and see the same sights, while the world goes on around me. I'm stuck in a world where everything moves but me.

I expected things to be different. I guess that's part of my problem -- I expected. One should learn never to expect things to be a certain way; it leads to disappointment. I thought I'd at least have a job by now, maybe a bigger apartment, a sibling for Jude-Cat. What I want out of life is relatively simple ... at least I think it is. I look around me at my friends, at people my age with houses and spouses and kids, and I want half of what they've got: an apartment I can stretch out my arms in, a date for next Friday, another cat. But here I sit, stuck in neutral while everyone else is in drive. I am, to put it bluntly, a loser.

Yes, I am feeling sorry for myself -- it's yet another one of my charms come lately. I've told myself all sorts of worn-out platitudes to snap myself out of this funk, all the way down to, "Brighten the corner where you are!" They don't work. In all honesty, I've felt this coming on for months: ever since I graduated, it's gotten a little worse every day, bit by bit. School wrung me out like a wet rag, but at least I had something to do. Now ... well now, not even reading really helps. I used to be able to lose myself in a book so easily, but these days I want to be out living my own life, not sitting on my worn-out, 3rd-hand love seat reading about someone else's.

I've also become acutely more aware of my poverty. I'm trying to be thankful for a roof and food and heat, but all I feel is frustrated. I have all this free time on my hands, and I don't even have the money to go anywhere. I have to choose between flying home to see my dying mother or saving what little money I have to help with a possible move to Harrisburg to grad school a year from now, if I can get there at all because of all the hurdles and the loans and the vast amount of debt it'll put me in. I have no reason to believe, at this point, that life after a Master's degree will be any different than life after a Bachelor's. What if I put myself $40,000 more in the hole and still can't find a job? It's harder for the handicapped to break into the world of the gainfully employed, and that's not self pity -- it's a fact. So I have hurdles because I'm poor and hurdles because I'm disabled, and hurdles because I'm poor and disabled ...

Look, universe. I know I've jumped a lot of hurdles in my life, but that's part of my problem. I'm tired. I would love for something to go my way just once.