thinking out loud

i am sitting in front of the laptop wondering why it is that i am without a concrete topic to blog about. perhaps it is because the past few times when i did blog, my time was so compartmentalized that i literally had to manufacture a blog entry to validate my existence as a thinking human being.

now that i am on break, i have had many bloggable events but i havent had the time nor the inkling to write about them. perhaps also, i think about blogging as a way to procrastinate from studying, which i dont have to do at the moment. so here is a free-flow of thoughts i have at the moment.

i just came from this incredible wave of depression (maybe i still am in it, a little bit) because most of my law school friends have gone on to graduate and take the bar, and are now fielding job offers left and right. and i still don't know if i will graduate. the baguio trip was meant to forget all of that, but sometimes, there's just no getting around it, and you will have to face yourself in the mirror and hope you don't hate your reflection for the decisions you've made so far.

i think...when i don't factor in where other people in my batch are, i'm okay. but it is hard, because when you look at it from a highschool / college / law school perspective, this "taking time" detour of mine really cost me most of my 20s i think, and now i am still unable to see any benefits to this detour i took. sure, people are getting married later now, but people from almost every aspect of my life are somehow farther down the road than i am, and sometimes it makes me want to kill myself. especially when i have to pinch pennies in order to get what i want. it kills me sometimes to think that at 26 years old, i still am unable to purchase for myself things that are almost basic to other people. it is very much a routine cycle of scrounging around for me, and also praying that i pass.

this year, i feel as if travel has been my refuge. it has somehow released an inner voice that reminded me of where i want to go, and of why i took my breaks in the first place. i wanted to be able to go and hear myself think. i was able to reconnect with parts of my old self in australia, to see a yearning for a different kind of life from what i had here. when i was in New York i thought the reason I was so excited to be there was only because I wanted so badly to be away from the rules in our house, but when I was in australia, i felt that same sense of belonging, in this world full of strange looking people. I felt (and still do feel) that I belong more there than I do here. Here i just feel weird most of the time. I wonder if (and when) i finish law and the bar i will feel more as though i belong.

or maybe i am fighting the urge to acknowledge that i am better suited somewhere else that is not here - and that's okay. so what if i'm barely 30 when i graduate from law school? so what if i reach the age of 30 when i apply to grad school somewhere? so what if i am unmarried without any prospects still by then?

i realized that as i get older and more used to this position, being at this age, i tend to care less about what other people think. partly because it's been driven into my brain by well-meaning friends, partly because i finally got that even when people think what i think they will think, what they think will hardly matter in the long run - except when i let it get to me.