Headfucked- Should I stay or should I go now?
I can officially say that I have never felt more schitzophrenic about life.
After devoting two years of my life to Spain, I have decided to move back to the US, specifically Albuquerque. Back to the land of cars, awful government, worse food, and limited horizons. Also the land of opportunity, community, and my family.
What has prompted this dramatic change of plans was realizing what I should do as a career- Courtroom translation and interpretation. I love to do real time translation, the law facinates me, and it pays rather well. After the plan became clear to me, it became harder and harder to justify spending another year teaching English and partying. Im ready to do bigger things with my life, and this requires me to finish school and work my tail off. It is simply time to do it. Without direction I become stagnant and down rather easily. The stagnation that prompted me to leave here had been creeping its way into my life in Spain, and nipping it in the bud is the only way for me to keep any sort of head on my shoulders.
Another reason for the move is that I was living without papers for two years, and you can only reasonably expect to do so for so long before The Man catches on.
Plus there is going to be a lot of birth, death, and life this year, a lot of it I feel I need to be around for. Every time there was a birth, death, or life changing event in NM these last two years I had the horrible and impotent feeling of being able to do nothing more than call. The people in my life need me here, and as much as I would like to deny it, I need them.
A lot of it is just financial. Im in debt and go further into debt every year I spend out there. Im also fed up with being SO damn poor (I only earned about $5000-year in Spain).
I just hope and pray that Im making the right decision. I think part of the reason this seems like the right thing to do is because I have been starved for affection (platonic and otherwise) for quite awhile. I tried (a lot...), but the spanish ladies never responded to my mack. And while I had quite a few friends there, I almost always felt like a tag-along, and rarely, if ever, felt accepted as an equal. I suppose that's normal when you are a foreigner, but none the less gets old pretty goddamn soon. None of the people I know who have lived in foreign countries for more than two years did it alone, they always moved with their spouse, or met their spouse overseas. I feel as though it is admitting a weakness, but I cant feel right living my life without love in it any longer.
Right as it seems to move back, I cant stop second guessing myself. Sometimes I see how the majority of people I know here live and remember why I needed to get the fuck out in the first place. SImply put, Albuquerque can be one hell of a depressing place to live. The nightly dreams of Granada, in all its beauty, dont help me feel like Im doing the right thing either. But Im not sure that the frustration of being there would be any better than the frustration of being here.
The only thing I know to do when I feel like this is to trust my bloated gut, which is telling me to stay (right now, at least). I hate these either/or decisions, there is a certain amount of second guessing and regret involved in whichever choice you make. Goddamn Atlantic ocean.....why does spain have to be so far away?
In case I have made the wrong choice, I feel better knowing that Spain isnt going to go anywhere, and while it isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, moving out there is easier than it seems. If I want to move back later, I will, and this time with papers written up and some type of plan to move ahead with life.