Archive

Taking Chances

posted 10th June 2011    Written by: Katharine    CATEGORY: All Posts, Job/Career/Work, Katharine, Love/Relationships, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 4, Travel/Adventure

At the start of 2011, my words were passion and intention.  I wanted to find a way to live passionately and with intention every day.  It’s now halfway through the year, and my new words are: take a chance.

TAKE A CHANCE.

It sounds so simple, but it’s so hard and complicated.  The problem with taking a chance is that we don’t know what the end result will be and we don’t know if we’ll be any happier than before.  Yet, I realized that every time I’ve taken a chance, I’ve never regretted it.  In fact, sometimes I’ve turned out a bit happier than before.

I took a chance staying in Australia for this long when my intention was to be here for four days and then move elsewhere.  I started forming friendships and connections with people at my hostel and the local pub and I realized that I needed to give this city and these people more of my time.

Truthfully, one reason why I’ve stayed in Sydney for this long is because I met someone.  They say you find it when you least expect it.  I wasn’t looking for anything.  I don’t even know what I want in regards to dating and relationships anymore.  Sometimes I miss the companionship and comfort of a relationship but other times I love being single and independent.  Part of this journey around the world was to figure out what I wanted, but then I met a man and it all just … clicked.

Things tend to move much quicker when you travel abroad.  I met him two weeks ago at the pub he worked at located right next to the hostel.  He finished his shift and joined a handful of backpackers to a local nightclub.  I spent much of that night talking to him (his Australian accent sucked me in, what can I say?) and the next thing I know, it’s 4AM and we’re standing outside of my hostel making plans for the next night later that night.

I don’t typically fall for men this quickly, but there’s just something about him.  He’s genuine, warm-hearted, and honest.  He has a strong passion for life, big career goals, and can make me laugh from my soul.  It’s new, it’s different, it’s refreshing. I’ve never felt this way about a man this quickly.

I didn’t think I’d find a man who lives halfway around the world and has the ability to make me want to stay in one city for this long.  I didn’t think I’d be one of those people who would consider taking a chance on a boy and a shot at love under these circumstances.

Too Good to be True

But as my luck would have it, I was recently offered a teaching position that would take me away from the boy and out of Australia all together for an indefinite amount of time.

Truthfully, I don’t know what to do.  I finally found a city I love and a man who compliments me and I have to either sacrifice all of that for a job I truly love, or sacrifice this job opportunity for a relationship that may not necessarily last after my visa expires.

I’m falling in love with Australia every day, but this country is ridiculously expensive and I’m not sure how long I can financially continue staying here on holiday (while there are some language schools in Australia, it’s currently the off-season and there aren’t many English teaching jobs available). Yet, if I take this job at a language school in Taiwan, there’s a good chance I’m going to regret passing up this shot at being happy and [maybe] in love in Australia.

Nothing in life that’s worth having comes easy.

I want to take a chance, but I don’t know at what.  I can go to Taiwan at the end of June to teach English, reconnect with friends who are teaching there, and take a chance at being passionate about a career; or I can stay in Australia for the next two months, continue living a rock-star lifestyle, and take a chance on being happy in Australia with this man and this foundation I’ve created for myself.

Take a chance.

It sound so easy, yet it’s so hard and complicated.

{photo credit: matsuyuki}

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The Feminist In Me Is A Romantic

posted 14th October 2010    Written by: Marian    CATEGORY: All Posts, Life Lesson, Love/Relationships, Marian, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 3

Most of my identity is defined by feminism. I was raised by two feminists, concentrated in gender studies at school and spent a year writing my thesis on how and why college-aged women define themselves as feminists.

While I’m of the mindset that a feminist can be a stay-at-home-mom or a high-powered executive, I’ve always fallen into the category of “independent woman who isn’t sure if she wants to get married.” I despise engagement rings, preach about the sexism in romantic comedies and will occasionally blame “men” as if a penis defines fifty percent of our population.

Yet I’m also a Twihard. Dated one guy for seven years and have been with another for (sort of) three. I want lots and lots of babies. I like the occasional bouquet and cried like a baby during The Notebook. Deep down, the feminist in me is a romantic.

Looking back over the past year of my QLC, love has been the turning point of my life. Regardless of my “hardcore” feminist tendencies or inability to fuse those two sides of my personality, love is the entire reason I am where I am and I do what I do.

I’m not saying a feminist can’t move across the world for love – far from it. I think – I know – a feminist can do whatever the hell she wants. It’s her attitude towards women that matters (read this amazing post by my friend J. Maureen of Gen Meh). Still though, I guess I never thought I’d be the kind of girl who would do what I did. Drop everything. Fly across the Atlantic. Move in with a guy I hadn’t spent any real time with in over a year.

Needless to say, it was a big change. One I don’t regret for a single second.

I know everyone says this, but when we’re on our deathbeds are we going to remember the major career accomplishments or the relationships we made? The people we loved?

Love taught me what the Quarter Life Crisis is all about. What being authentic is all about. It also taught me “what really matters.”

What really mattered wasn’t my job or my geographical location or money or what everyone else was doing. What mattered was Sam. Realizing I was allowed to pick up and go simply because I was happier with him was the hardest realization of my life, but also the easiest decision to make.

While it’s always been a bit of a struggle to make peace between The Feminist in me and The Romantic, I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I can be both. If I ever get married (Big “If”), I can do it without selling my soul. I don’t have to ever change my name. I can raise my sons and daughters in the way my parents raised me. There is no either or. No one or the other. The feminist in me is a romantic, and it’s finally okay by me.

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The 21st Century Threesome: Me, You, and My Blog

posted 16th March 2010    Written by: Nicole Antoinette    CATEGORY: Love/Relationships, Nicole Antoinette, Season 2

It came up in bed one night, our first night actually, a night that I already liked him hard enough to not fall into sex when we were still too new as an us for it to be a good idea.

And so we talked, back and forth and all over each other until 5am, telling each other about who we are and where we’ve been and what we want from these big shiny adult lives that seem to have popped up out of nowhere.

He talked about music, I talked about food. We did big picture and small specifics and if he could have read my mind that night, he’d know that what I was really trying to do was figure out how he fit into the life I was putting everything on the line to build.

We jumped from topic to topic, mainlining each other’s details, until we finally settled into the conversation about writing. It came up naturally, on the heels of a string of thoughts about overwhelming passion, and I told him that I wanted to write more than I wanted air. He laughed in a way that said, “You’re dramatic but I get you,” and it made me blush in a way that said, “Stop but don’t.”

I told him that I write to understand myself, that I have to put it, everything, down in words and throw it out into the world before it can make sense to me.

We talked about our blogs, his much newer than mine, and I shared that living my life out loud is a sacrifice I made by accident and now couldn’t get out of if I tried. I told him it’s probably a good thing that I don’t want to try.

He fell asleep before me, arms wrapped around my body in that gentle octopus way that I always say I don’t like but secretly crave, and I thought about how gradually and unintentionally my blog really has infiltrated every single part of my life. There I was, in that bed, in that corner of town, with that breath against my ear and none of it would be happening if I didn’t write about my life on the internet.

I think about this a lot actually, about how the boundaries of offline me and online me have bled together to create a mashup version of who I am and I realize that in a lot of ways, I use my blog as a filter. The people I interact with on a daily basis are all people I’ve met through my blog, and while I like that by the time I meet them in person they have an accurate sense of what it’ll be like to have a relationship with me, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be social without a virtual ice breaker, how to show someone who I am from the very beginning, without my blog as a crutch.

This is true with friends, but it’s even truer with dating.

Any guy who’s having a relationship with me is also having a similarly intense relationship with my blog; if he’s sleeping with me, he’s sleeping with the fact that almost everything I do winds up online, and if he’s not okay with that, it’s just not going to work.

And this is the challenging part, the delicate balancing act that’s true of all threesomes, the question of which thing I’m more attracted to, the guy or my blog, and whether it really is possible to have both at once without ruining either one.

photo credit: guldfisken

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