Plans

A friend expressed surprise that I am not planning to stay in Boston. I'm not. I have wanted to be in a home in Indiana since I first visited there in March; I want to go do my masters' in food studies and a PhD in landscape design to build sustainable, food-producing, noninvasive, artistic gardens. I want to do tai chi. I want to birdwatch. I want to start my art company. I want to live somewhere quieter, and greener, and cheaper than Boston, and had been even before I left Boston, as much as I love all my friends here.

It was already time for a change for me before I moved--hence quitting the job and doing an art internship for a month. I was certainly making more progress with my art and cooking and gardening and martial arts and boundaries with my parents--all things that make me happy in and of themselves--in Indiana than I had in Boston in years, despite the fact I was also trying to set up a house and also got quite sick a lot this summer.

In Indiana, I:
Made new kinds of bread and food
Made a great deal of headway on trimming/pruning a neglected garden
Made and submitted a tshirt design for a weekly contest
Wrote four book reviews
Wrote two complete longform poems, and started in again on a work I hadn't looked at since 2007
Took up tai chi again
Deliberately exercised as often as possible to feel good about my own body
Cooked often to be creative, to feel healthy, and to positively take charge of my own diet issues and concerns
Started roughing out applications essays for the food studies program at IU
Learned how to play board and computer games for relaxation with and without friends, without calling myself lazy or feeling guily and without beating myself up when I lost
Wrote text and designed banners for my web store
Began to learn css for my design portfolio
Learned how to use the newest version of iMovie
Started on a webdesign project for my father for my portfolio that I hadn't touched in three months
Started laying aside papers to be scanned or placed into my portfolio/website
Created several sets of notecards with a hand-made stamp of my own design
Designed and sewed a Nintendo DS case
Designed several cellphone charms to sell in my web store
Organized a great deal of my personal paperwork
Found a therapist
Started setting serious boundaries in my relationship with my parents
Started making friends
Decided on a career path and was embarking on creating an income stream from work I genuinely enjoyed
Enjoyed the process of reassessing what I needed from my romantic relationships with both of my partners, and enjoying their own reassessment, though one of those ended abruptly and badly

I think I was able to do all this because I finally felt I had a home, a solid place, physically and in my heart, to reach out from. It turns out that neither those physical or emotional places can be my home anymore now, but that does not mean that I can not and should not make my own--in fact, it is probably the only thing I can and should do right now. In time there will be other physical and emotional places, or maybe some of the old ones differently, with the passage of time and life.

I am planning to use the next few months to find a job in Indiana, and make a portfolio, and write, and apply for grad school at IU, and do martial arts, and finish my basilisk mask, and go to therapy and get meds, and hang out with people when I want, since that is what I was planning on doing anyway. It has been going slowly due to mourning and computer issues, but I am working on those as best I can.

I was not planning on looking for an apartment and packing and moving, and I am not looking forward to doing those things so soon after having just done them--especially since I wanted a vacation this year and both of my vacations were effectively cancelled due to first dire sickness and then breakup, and I did not take a vacation last year either due to cancellation--but if I have to do those unpleasant things in order to do the other things where I want, I think I can forego a vacation.