Mary + Her Mental Health

It won’t be any great shock if I say that since college my life has been in almost a constant state of flux. That’s true for almost everyone, right, and it’s certainly true for me. After all, it’s only I, (the Roman symbol for desperate and hermitic) and no one else but I, so frankly I get rapidly bored with the I. However, and this is something I’ve just recently noticed: as one gets older, frequent and drastic life changes are rather frowned upon, connoting instability restlessness and, in some extreme cases, neurological underdevelopments. Not very sexy.

Today, I am exactly one month shy of 32. And even I sense that by this stage in life I should be responsible and mature enough to stick to one job for more than a year and half, stay in one city, live in the same apartment, and talk regularly to the same people without aggressively resisting the urge to set my hair on fire. If you're 32 and married with children, this is precisely what your life is: you stick to one job (for the benefits, or because your job is being "Mom"), you stay in one city because of the school system, and you talk to your spouse, every day, and pretty much no one else, forever and ever. I'm not married yet, but it's almost as if part of me thinks like a married person, but only part. Bottom line, I just think I need to stop living like a college student.

In order to satisfy both the social demands placed upon 32 year-olds as well as the self-imposed ones, and to continually achieve success in the avoidance of self-hair-burning, I have found some middle ground. And it is thus: I have made plans to move to a new lovely suburb of Boston at the beginning of August, and into a beautiful apartment with three new lovely ladies. I am keeping my job, meanwhile currently looking for supplemental means of income, to liven up the monotony. Finally, already I have begun to make new friends who have, just in the last couple weeks, added a great measure of fun and happiness into my life. No, Mom, I do not have a boyfriend. Kindly note the plural, platonic usage of “friends.” Enough change to satisfy; enough stability to pacify.

People in the area have already begun to ask me what in the world I’m going to do without my precious roommate, Peggy. The answer is simple: I cannot and willnot do without her. That is why I’m only moving 10 minutes away. There will be a lot of late-night 10-minute drives back and forth between her place and mine. There will be withdrawal symptoms too ugly to describe so publicly. (some less gruesome examples: head-banging; running mindlessly into walls; wearing a thin dingy nightgown singing “Come Sail Away” in a minor key and rocking, to name a few…)

There is no way to describe what Peggy means to me. She’s been my Boston sister for almost three years. We moved out here at the same time, meeting as roommates in November of 2003, and I don't want to know what Boston would be like without Peggy. She is absolutely amazing, and no one can calculate the love I have for her, or my gratitude for all that she’s put up with from me. That girl knows me so well, all the good the bad and the hopelessly dysfunctional. But I’m not afraid to be known by her; so far, she seems to be on par with it all. And though I do itch for certain things to change every now and again, the stable force of Peggy in my life is not available for overhaul.