Eredien's Journal

2014 Resolutions, early this year.

Save Money to Move: Now that I have a job, I can start saving money again. I've got a life I want to live--travel, good food, books, plans for a home with people I love--and I've got to get away from where I am now, which is unacceptable. Goal: move back to Boston in 2015. <strike>set up direct deposit to bank accounts</strike> and otherwise touch my money as little as possible in 2014.

Exercise, the way I Love: I don't have to spend money on a gym membership I hardly use, sitting there and struggling with body image. I can just start doing tai chi again at home. Better mental (and physical) balance, and it's free. My mother can stuff her reservations about 'unwomanly' martial arts. Goal:enjoy what I do to lose weight and reduce body dysphoria. Exercise an hour a day.

Pay attention to My Creative Life: I thought I'd lost the desire to write. It was hibernating. I love welcoming challenging creative endeavor back into my life. I have a novel, a sestina, and at least three short stories clamoring for completion. Goal: 100 words a day. Don't get overwhelmed; just work at it. The words will add up.


Now, a progress report from 2013:
Goal: Get on a medication that works for my bipolar depression and keep taking it. (This is already started; just have to discuss my med choice w/therapist and start taking it). Result: success. I feel awful that I couldn't do this earlier and hurt a lot of people in my life, but I literally wasn't in a space where I could do this, earlier. I can hold down a job again, and do well at it. My therapist and I agreed that I'm done with routine therapy. Medications and therapy, and my determination to get well, even thought it was born from a deep sadness, helped save my life.

Goal: Eat fewer processed grains. "Less white flour, more wheat flour." See what that does. Result: mixed. I've been eating less pasta and refined grains; more quinoa, oats, and whole grains. It wasn't life-changing, but I've now got a habit of eating a little more fiber now. I'm going to call this a win.

Goal: Secret resolution: try new sex thing. This particular thing did not happen, but I am working on it, and my three loving partners, as well as my astounding group of friends, have made 2013 a wonderful year for me in so many more ways than I can count. I'm grateful to you all. This entry was originally posted at http://eredien.dreamwidth.org/3048.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

2011 was kind of a wash for me. There were some good things--making new friends, seeing old ones, achieving the goal I'd had (and had been stymied in by doctors and moving for 2+ years) of actually getting on depression medication, helping my boyfriend figure out what he needs from himself in a relationship with me and his other SO, starting the process of recognizing the good decisions I made in 2010 and forgiving myself for the bad ones. There were some bad things--sharing an apartment with an alcoholic who "forgot" to pay the internet and fix the heat, moving into a second apartment where one roommate constantly promised to move but didn't and the landlord preferred evictions over conversations; having my phone die; having both laptops die; and generally running short of cash from too many moves with too little preparation in too little time.

I am proud that:
- I have started beta-testing as a vendor at an online marketplace which I can't talk about yet but is going to be awesome.
- I have gotten on medication and it has made my life better. I am not scared of medication anymore: it makes me be the person I am at my best, instead of the person I am when I'm at my worst. I am still waiting for medicaid to come through, which is a paperwork bear (as opposed to a paper tiger), but knowing that my doctors won't write off my depression as something I am making up, or tell me that if I changed my body drastically in terms of weight I wouldn't be depressed anymore, is pretty awesome. Also, getting a 90-day refill from my therapists in MA without having to pay $120 out of pocket every three months is amazing. I wish that option had been available to me in October, but now that I am on meds again I am less angry about the fact that it wasn't, and less angry about the fact that I lost another place that had become home because of the fact that the medical establishment limited my access to necessary medication because my insurance wasn't any good there and I couldn't pay out of pocket. Both of these things are good.
- I have become more informed, and more self-informed, about race and the history of racism, both worldwide and in America.
- I have started watching movies and anime that I want to watch and reading books I want to read and reviewing them online when I feel like it. This seems like a very small thing, but when you have held off on having the experiences you wanted to have because you wanted not just the experience of doing the thing, but also the meta-experience of experiencing that experience with other people who care about you and the experience, and the other people want to share those experiences with you but don't set aside time to do so, eventually you get tired of waiting for the other people. It's not as much fun as experiencing these things alone, and I don't enjoy it as much as I would if I had a group of friends and loved ones with me. But it's better than being told, "I want to have this experience and I want to experience it with you, but I won't set a time to tell you when and won't let you set a time for me," and getting confused, hurt, and resentful at constantly having to hold back experiences I wanted to have yesterday, so that I can have them on someone else's constantly-unspecified timeframe, and then hurting the people I love when I express my hurt and resentment to them but present it to them, wrongly, as a personal character failure on their part.
- I have determined that it is necessary for me to find a long-term relationship with another person (probably a woman-type person) who makes it clear to me that I am a pleasure in their life and won't doubt my love for them, while also continuing my relationship with [Bad username or site: ab3nd" @ livejournal.com] for the foreseeable future. I am not ready to go find that relationship yet. I still hurt too much. But I think determining that it was necessary was a good thing.
- I have determined that to get this relationship, I need to make it clear to the other person that they are a pleasure in my life and I want to live with them and enjoy their company and love them, and I will do this by not pointing out the goodness of the good things in my life, instead of complaining about the few bad points of the good things in my life, which is basically how I lose a lot of loved ones and friendships. I was better at this in the past, and I can get better at it again.
- I started going back to the gym (actually, it's what I'm going to do after I finish writing this journal entry). I am going to the gym not even to get in shape because my doctors won't medicate me for sleep issues without weight loss on my part (which was largely the case in 2009-10) or because I think losing weight will make my partners want me more or less than they ever did, because I'm beautiful whether people can see it or not: I am going because an hour or so of physical activity a day gives me a specified time alone to get in touch with my body via physical meditative activity, as well as an opportunity to listen to new music, podcasts, and audiobooks which I wouldn't have time for otherwise. An hour or so of physical activity a day is a great way to set aside positive time for me having my need for time to make and consume art be interrupted by other people's demands of me.
- I have accepted the fact that my family will never approve of my relationships, whether those are friendships or loved ones, because they have a hard time approving of many of the things I do, because they have a hard time approving of themselves because they are resentful of the things they tell themselves they cannot do. Their lack of approval of my relationships is not my problem or my partners' problem. I will keep doing what I am doing in my romantic and sexual life and remind myself to have compassion for others who think poorly of me when I make choices that make me happy, and who think poorly of my friends and loved ones when they make choices that make them happy, and limit my association with such people.
- Finally, I am most proud of getting rid of almost all of my stuff except what I was actually using. I had too much of it, and too much of it was around because I wanted to be a person who had specific experiences (skiing, reading, making jam) but did not actually have those experiences, and so the stuff just sat there reminding me of all the things I wanted to experience but hadn't. If I want to do that stuff, I can: I can borrow someone else's jam making set, or rent skis, or buy more books (though I got a Kindle for Christmas, which is awesome because I will no longer need to move with boxes and boxes of physical books but will still be able to read to my heart's wallet's content. It also makes moving a lot easier for me, both physically and psychologically).

Resolutions for 2012:
- Finish and publish at least two things.
- Continue 365 Days of Art (which took a hiatus for the holidays and will be back today).
- Continue to make my relationships with loved ones deeper by complimenting the people I love instead of complaining about my or their shortcomings within a relationship, which makes them think that I don't love them or respect their choices or respect myself despite my shortcomings, makes me feel that they don't care about what bothers me, and gets me the opposite of what I actually want when I complain (which is respect for the fact that I am bothered by something, manifesting in a mutual discussion about how and why to resolve the problem).
- Keep on meds without a break.
- Sell model horses on ebay.
- Transfer old cassette tape music to MP3s. Sync all MP3 collections across devices.
- Setup KeePass to manage passwords safely between devices. Setup gmail with 2-step authentication again and this time print out everything.
- Catch them all in Pokemon SoulSilver or Diamond.
- Pay off credit card debt, personal debt, cellphone debt, and personal loans racked up in 2010-2011 through unexpected moving and continued medical expenses.
- Continue paying off education loan on a regular basis.
- Make sure multiple address change(s) have percolated through USPS system. easy!
- Sell awesome things on online store.
- Make professional-looking website/twitter.
- Keep going to the gym 3x week. Do not allow my mother to manipulate me into going to the gym more than I need or want to.
- Get a job, preferably with benefits. Continue to explore career options with hands-on internships related to N. Bennett St School degree tracks.
- Apply to N. Bennett St School this year.
- Travel to weddings of various friends. Enjoy myself there. Mission accomplished!
- Get in touch with gender activists at other womens' colleges and continue to work for the rights of MTF transgender women as women in traditionally bio-female-only spaces.
- Transfer LJ to Dreamwidth and set up cross-posting there.
- Get hormone balance tested by a doctor, with new results instead of old ones. Life without PMS is really, truly amazing.
- Get sleep tested by a doctor.
- Get allergy tested by a doctor.
- Make a financial plan for the next 5 years.
- Plan 2013 travel, with suggested places including DC, Boston, Toronto, California, and Belgium.
- Make plans to move back to Boston, including budgeting for a space without roommates and medical emergencies.
- Bike commute in spring, summer, and fall whenever possible.
- Optional bonus resolution: compose music.

Please fill out this poll on graduate education. I find myself woefully undereducated on:
- How other people decide what they want to do for graduate education
- How they fund it when they decide what they want to do

[Edit: this poll hasn't gotten any responses today. Do you guys think it's too personal?]

Since I want to go back to school, I figured I should at least figure out which directions to start looking in and try and ignore the ones that are not actually salient, but I realized that I didn't actually know which directions those were.

Typing "grad school funding" into google is a nightmare of conflicting advice, and talking with people about how they picked their career path seems to net me a lot of people who either already knew what they wanted to do and what degree they needed to do it with, or got a job doing something they liked and then ended up going to graduate school for it, but I don't fit into either of those options and figure some of you might not, either.

I figure that a poll of several hundred people is bound to get more than 10 replies and is a good place to start.

( How did you fund and understand your post-undergraduate education? )