I’m exhausted.

I’ve been crying nonstop for almost three hours now. Just over a stupid fight with the rest of my family. My dad has a really bad temper, and you never know what might tick him off. And he never sticks to the subject of discussion when he gets angry. Out of the blue he started talking about how I don’t like to take the bus (I get really angsty whenever I have to take the bus short-distance, for some reason). He said it was probably because I felt that I was better than the other people on the bus, because I have a better education than them! At first I just stared at him, trying to figure out if I in any way had misunderstood what he had just said. Then, in anger, I swore loudly (and I don’t normally swear a lot), threw my water bottle at him, and eventually broke down crying.

He’s been trying to be nice to me afterwards, just asking random questions for the sake of showing some goodwill. And probably to check if I’m still mad. It’s so random, like “Are your mountain boots warm enough to wear in winter?”, “Do you have any plans to go camp out at Holmenkollen to see the ski World Cup?” (dude, when have I ever expressed any interest in skiing? Or camping??), “How long does your laptop battery last?”, and most random of all: “How different is the Welsh language from the Irish language? And the Scottish language?”

I finally got tired of tears streaming silently down my face, so I went to hide in my room. I took to reading Eat Pray Love again, clinging to it as if it were the Elixir of Life. Thinking to myself that this is what I should do – take off, travel the world for a year, and come back a changed person. Figure out what I want in the process. Or just travel until I figure it all out, however long it takes. Basically, I was thinking “If she can do it, I can do it!”

Then, however, it dawned on me that this woman is tall, blonde, thin, pretty, and rich. And to top it all off, her biggest talent is that she can make friends anywhere and everywhere. Yes, basically she is and can do all that I am not and cannot. So I started crying again.

This Friday we all had a job conversation with a guy who’s mapping out the work environments in our county. Basically the whole conversation was based around the question “What’s it like for you, on a very personal basis, to work here?” The guy was so sweet, and a very good listener, and I ended up pouring off my chest everything that’s been going on lately. It felt so good to get it out there to someone who might actually help make a difference, though I’m so nervous about hearing the combined result. What if I’m the only one who complained, and the rest of the people are extremely, brain-washed puppet-y happy??

But I felt better all the rest of Friday, and all of Saturday, and then there’s today and now I feel worse than ever. I’ve never before wanted so badly to just run away from everything. I’m no longer sure what scares me the most – staying here or going away. And what if I go on that pilgrimage and I come back home afterwards and feel just as lost as before? I mean, I’m definitely going – I’m more sure of that now than I ever was before! But what if I’m holding on so hard to this idea that it might bring some sort of enlightenment that I’ll end up shutting the actual experience out? My cousin’s wife sometimes tells me my fortune in her cards, and every time she tells me to open up my “third eye”, I actually end up completely shutting her out of my head. The more I try to open up, the more I’m actually closing up.

This – I think – is the story of my life.