i turn 29 in a week so it's time for my annual birthday reflection
i read my birthday post from last year and it was full of mixed feelings: relief and joy that i finally live with oomf and am not socially isolated like i was in st louis, but scared and depressed because of being unemployed and the dip my mental health took as a result. a year later i am doing a lot better in some ways but still struggling in others.
job-wise, i finally found one five months later. i love the people i work with and i love the flexibility of private practice, but the summer is always a slow season and it makes me worry about paying my bills. i applied to a couple jobs with a couple abortion funds, but i messed up the job title in one of the cover letters and the other one is super competitive. still, my therapist pointed out that it's a great sign in terms of my healing from the fund mess and clinic grief that i applied to those jobs at all. i don't necessarily want to leave my current job, i just want a fuller caseload. i don't want to go back to community mental health, so unless i switch career paths i'm gonna stay at my current practice. i guess we will see what happens.
speaking of therapists, i finally found one. it took 7 months of living here, but in february i started working with someone and resumed emdr because it became clear that the processing i did in st louis was not sufficient. i have made a lot of progress in some areas (sorority hazing, fund mess, clinic grief) and am still working on others, but i am happy that i am able to afford therapy and continue making progress at all.
i think it's important to elaborate on the areas where i still need to make progress in order to check in next year on how things are going. mainly, i am oscillating between feeling particularly traumatized and ruminating on either my relationship with nick or jh. the past few months it has been nick, this month it is jh. with nick, i was struggling with remembering the happy parts of our relationship, but he blocked me and i processed that in therapy so i haven't thought about him as much. with jh, i just want to get to a point where i accept that it's over with him and we are never going to be as close as we were yet i will always love him in some way. again, i guess we will see what happens.
i still love oomf and plan to marry them someday (though not anytime soon because i can barely afford my bills right now). living together has been wonderful, especially being able to get cuddles and kisses every day rather than a few days out of the year. even when we have tense conversations (we don't really fight), we have been able to work through it together. hopefully we continue going from strength to strength.
friendship wise, i still feel pretty lonely most of the time, but it is less overwhelming because i have been processing it in therapy. i have a combination birthday/housewarming party tonight that i hope goes well. i went to beyonce with my best friend a couple weeks ago and was best woman in his wedding in march. i am having lunch with a longtime friend that i know from the repro world whom i have never met in person next week. things aren't bad on the friend front, but they could be better.
turns out i didn't write a reflection before my 19th birthday, which makes sense because i was so busy with rush and coming back from studying abroad in france. i remember that summer being pretty life-changing for me, because i was convinced i wanted to transfer right before study abroad but then i found people in that program who shared my ambition. my post before turning 24 is ridiculously optimistic in hindsight considering how devastated i actually was due to my grief from the clinic being sold and the uncertainty of being in lockdown due to the pandemic, but it was nice to re-read and reflect on the positive aspects of moving to st louis.
all in all, i think i'm in a better place than i was this time last year. hopefully in a year i am still in a relatively good place, and the areas of improvement i identified in this post ameliorate.