Part of where I'm going, is knowing where I'm coming from...

I'm not generally a lonely person. I get lonely, as most humans do, but I'm not lonely. I however, do enjoy my alone time. I moved in with my boyfriend Bogey (obviously not his real name guys...though that would be funny), and figuring out how to go form long distance (an hour away from each other, not bad) to sharing most of our entire days together was certainly an adjustment I had to go through. Bogey is in med school, so his activities include studying and TV and being social. He doesn't read like I do (not that he doesn't enjoy it), he doesn't write or spend time doing crafts for hours like I can (though he is pretty crafty when he puts his mind to it). It was hard. I can entertain myself for LITERALLY hours, writing, readings, messing around with old notebooks and journals, the Internet, obviously, Tumblr, making playlists, crafting and collage-ing... But he's just not like that as much. I would feel bad when he was looking for something to do meanwhile I had too much to do. He would of course tell me it was stupid to feel bad that he was short on hobbies, but I honestly did! And of course, during the first few months, we spent every minute together, like we were catching up on time form the last two years when he's lived in Bloomington when we weren't at work or school. I went through a crisis realizing that I wasn't writing anymore--that sort of relates to how time- and energy-consuming my internship was over the summer--but I didn't know how to find balance.

But now I have.

 I think the two biggest key components for me were 1. Getting a job I liked that didn't drain my soul of the energy to create and thrive and 2. Getting comfortable enough with living with another human being. I had to realize that Bogey wasn't going anywhere, we are both in this apartment and it's going to stay that way, us together, and getting comfortable enough to say, "no, Bogues. I am going to go over here and cut shit out of magazines and collage for a bit while listening to the entire Phildel Youtube playlist because that's what I do and that's what I want to do now." When you move in with someone, you have to unveil all those quirks about yourself. It's like the early stages of a relationship again, like when you both admitted you're normal human beings with flatulence after you eat Mexican food. He knows I collage--I used to collage the walls of my room with magazine cutouts--but he hadn't seen the scrapbooks I've filled. He knows I write and fill up notebooks, but he hadn't really seen inside the two crates of notebooks I've been carting around for years and he hadn't been there when I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea and gone stumbling around in the dark for a bit of paper and a pen (I've written an idea on my hand before in the dark so I wouldn't forget it. Then I slept on my hand. Bet you know how that ended.)

Either way, moving in with a significant other is a HUGE step. I come from a fairly old-fashioned family and when Bogey asked me, I thought of my grandma and what she would think. Luckily I have a beautiful, amazing older cousin who took the dive first. (Thank you cousin!) But it's not about what others think, if they say you should or shouldn't, ultimately, like everything else, moving in is something you have to decide with yourself. And we do it to see (hopefully) if that significant other might be a forever person. It makes you re-evaluate what is private and what isn't. And it's just another step closer to adulthood. Lately, every new thing that happens makes me think of my parents, and sometimes even my grandparents--they were kids once too, they went through this too, they very well might have felt exactly like me. I find that fascinating. I've always been interested in my roots. Maybe it's because I feel like if I know where I came from, I can know where I'm going. (Yes, that is a Gavin DeGraw song quote. Guess what the new title is changing to from: "Alone together--Living with someone, but making room for ME time." That sounded like an awful self-help book anyways.)

I'm happy with my life. And I'm happy with my life with Bogey. Sometimes it's just a good idea to take the dive and see what happens--unless it's off a bridge, even if your friends are doing it too.