Weddingbee boards

I preface this by saying that in many ways, I am truly lucky for many things in my life to be going relatively well. I have a job that I am pretty good at, and that I mostly like (save for the insane hours and the not being paid enough to work said insane hours, but I'm not a pauper). I live in a nice apartment in a wonderful neighborhood with my BF of 4 years and 1 month. I'm in relatively good health. It sounds like I have much to be happy about, no?

But I can't help but feel incredibly bummed out and bored and listless with my life right now. I have many hanging chads in my life as well, and my 30th birthday is rapidly approaching. And as another year draws to a close I can't help but feel like the world has left me behind in a sense. I know that comparing yourself to other people is the worst thing you can possibly do, but at the same time, I think it often provides a decent reality check.

My first woe is money. After many years of struggling to get it together, my finances are still a mess. I worked really hard over the last 2 years to clean up my credit and be better about money, but because we had to move out of our apartment this year 3 months early (and my BF refused to take our management company to small claims court for wrongfully keeping our security deposit), I spent more than I had to get out of bad situation and spiralled into financial woes all over again. Not to mention that I have been so overwhlemed with my job that I couldn't enroll and finish my masters program this year and didn't realize that my student loans were going back into repayment, which I can't afford to pay. While I have since established a savings account and commited to paying off credit cards, I still feel overwhelmed by the amount of debt I'm in and how long it's going to take me to get back to a financially stable place again. At 30, I had hoped this would have stopped haunting me by now. I had also hoped to have found a steady job much sooner and be making much more money by this point, but I'm at least on track in the job respect so I can live with the less than ideal timing.

I'm also on the cusp of trying to finish a Masters program that is completely unyeilding and unsympathetic to the fact that I have a full time job and work a minimum of 50 hrs a week, and have to travel for work for at least 4-6 days out of every month, if not more, and often on short notice. I have an internship requirement remaining that my department refuses to either waive or lessen the absurd hour requirement because, since joining the program, I have had not one but two full time jobs in the field I'm getting my degree in. This degree was so important to me that I loaned out the entire program and further dug myself into debt hoping it would help me advance my career in the long term (which, considering I've already gotten two full time jobs before even graduating, my program has technically already worked to my advantage). But I can't seem to get through to anyone above the head of my program to help me out.... I don't want waste $50K+, but I am only one person and I am trying to hold onto my job and grab onto any opportunities that arises for me to make a name for myself, which leaves me little time to do something as unnecessary to me as an internship for the sake of fulfilling a requirement.

And not to beat a dead horse, but it seems like the entire world is embracing adulthood in terms of marital and family status except me and my BF. It pains me to no end to consider the fact that I will mostly likely be the last of just about anyone and everyone I know to be married, and have probably been in a steady, serious relationship the longest. My BF has also had his share of financial problems in the past couple of years, but part of me feels like for whatever reason, he is not "growing up" yet. He is the oldest of three, and both of his younger sisters are married, one has a one year old and the other has one on the way. I feel like even his family has given up on us because they've stopped asking the age-old question... I even feel bad participating in his family stuff and the fact that they include me in the family calendar and Christmas card picture every year because even though he's said he wants to get married, I'm not sure what's holding him back from being as ready for it as I am. Part of my stress and anxiety comes from the fact that I am the requisite planner: I like to make dinner reservations a week in advance and book vacations and travel months in advance. I like structure, and I hate not knowing where I am going to be 6 months from now. We have discussed marriage in a general way, but I still don't feel like that's a firm enough commitment for me. My BF is a day-by-day person, which works in general, but it's not working for me anymore. I don't want to add unnecesary pressure but I don't want to miserable waiting for him to figure out when he needs to start taking concrete steps toward being a grown up. I'm obviosuly not perfect but I kind of have a life plan that I need to know he is on bored with....

And the boredom part: It probably stems from feeling overwhelmed by some of the abovementioned issues that I don't know where to start, and because almost everyone in my life has moved on and I have nothing in common with anyone anymore. I had two groups of really good friends - one from high school and one from college. All of my high school friends are or will soon be married, live in suburbia (so I can't even visit them often), and are or have started families. Of my college friends - all of whom live in different parts of the country now, only one other friend remains unmarried (and who I might be able to commisserate with), but she too appears to have moved on because she doesn't return calls or emails or texts anymore. I don't have many friends in NY left because I work about 85% of the time, and I am so exhausted and have so many other life things to attend to (like laundry and grocery shopping) that I don't really have time to hang out with any friends who are left. It's not because I don't want to hang out with people, but even friends I've made along the way after college have seemed to fade into the occasional once-a-month or once-every-two-months gathering.

I feel like every time I try to take steps to make things better for myself, something inevitably happens to set me back 10 steps of 20 I had taken forward. I am planning to use some of my much needed time off this week to try to get myself and my life in order, but I can't help but feel really blue. I just want things to finally work out for me (and keep working out for more than a couple of months or a year!).

UGH! I am generally not the type of person who always b**ches and moans about how hard her life is, because I know many people whose family members are suffering from various forms of cancer or who have been laid off. But I feel like I should be at a point in life where things should be settled and they aren't and it deeply troubles me. I know this too will pass. I am not looking for sympathy but would love any and all suggestions on how to get out of my life "rut".

Eva - I wish I could afford to. After Christmas presents, bills, travelling to spend Christmas with my BF's family, I've got almost no money left. Whatever I do, I feel it might involve a bottle of bourbon sitting on my bookshelf :)

crebre - thanks for that!! you give such awesome advice. i oftentimes feel so isolated in my own world because i don't know anyone in quite the same boat. i don't know what's scarier these days - turning 30 and not knowing where i'll be in the next 5 years, or feeling like i don't even have a good handle on things right now and thus setting myself up for disaster

unfortunately i have never been in a position where i was making enough money to do much of anything - hence living on credit for a long time and beginning my financial ruination....but being the only child of a single parent who was more concerned about putting food on the table and giving me the best education possible (rather than teaching me about money management and the concept of credit), my adult financial life has suffered as a result :( I can only hope that my working my a** off this past year and a half at my job will result in a halfway decent couple of raises in the years to come. i also work in an industry that is dependent on the economy doing well and institutions having the luxury of excess funds to hire designers, so who knows when anyone at my company will be getting a raise...

i am planning ot have a serious conversation with the BF at some point this week. he often gives very vague or evasive responses when we have serious conversations which makes me crazy to no end. but i'm finally at a point where it's really freaking me out that we have no concrete life plan or goals or milestones to work toward. ugh!

thanks layla - i am truly thankful for being at least halfway where i want to be. and as i said, i know some of this stuff i have control over and that's what i'm going to try to work on. but i appreciate your sentiment that the flip side is that it's never too late. but still, it is sometimes frustrating. i've stopped needlessly spending money and i'm making a promise to myself to start documenting every penny that goes into and out of my bank account and i'm not going to fall off the wagon this time! i also wish i could just fast forward to 50 or 60 so i won't really give a crap about this stuff anymore ;)

@crebre & okqueenbee - why is that 30 affects women so much more?? my BF just turned 31 and doesn't seem to give crap and seems totally ok just floating through life. it makes me want to slap him from time to time because i feel like he's living in an alternate universe....sigh.

thanks lopez - i def need many perspectives which is part of the reason i wanted to post here. and i appreciate what you have offered. i know for sure that complaining gets you nowhere and everywhere at the same time - complaining to the wrong people or to no one in particular gets you nowhere; complaining to the right people gets you everywhere (and gets you free airline tickets and discounts and things knocked off your dinner bill, etc. - i've mastered that!).

at the end of the day, i just feel like there are too many vague things in my life, especially on the relationship front. i am happy with my BF, but the problem is that he is too much of a "enjoy the now" person and i am the type of person who can't truly enjoy the here and now and just be in the moment unless i know that i have no reason to worry about tomorrrow and the next day and the next day. and i know i definitely have a bad case of grass is greener syndrome, which i need to let go of. it because difficult when that's all you see. i know people who have been married and divorced already, married colleagues who are having affairs, etc....

aww thank you MsMarch!! Yes, NY is a weird place where everything happens both sooner and later for many reasons. I do my best about beefing up my social life but to be honest, I'm tired ALL THE TIME. I work a bare minimum of a 10 hour day, but more 11 or 12 on average. Most of my friends are on a more 9-5 schedule. I know it sounds like I'm making excuses here, but it's extremely difficult to make plans because some days when I think I'll be done by 7, some disaster happens and I'm there till 8 or 9. Although I'm not saving lives in my line of work, I kinda feel like I'm a doctor in the sense that I can kind of always be "on call". And by the time Friday rolls around, all I want to do is sit on my a** and zone out, and sleep. I have about 3 or 4 friends left in NYC, and not having a car makes it extremely hard to see my NJ friends. But I agree that I need to start doing more things for *just* me, but finding the time is just hard.

cinnamon roll - my job is project based, and the project that i'm working on right now is opening in mid April. I haven't bene put on another full-time project as of yet (I am currently helping on another project but that contract is up in July and probably isn't full time work). I will probably have more time and a less demanding schedule come May, so I am hoping to work something out where I can work 4 - 4.5 days a week without taking a salary cut and try to do this stupid internship. I've also only been at my job for a year and a few months so it's not like I've been around long enough to have any pull for things like this either. My MA is all about connections and it's a pretty prestigious program, because there aren't too many like it out there. I've looked into other similar programs in this area but of the other 3 available, two require internships and the third would be like practically starting from scratch. I think it's important for me to finish my internship and get my degree because I eventually want to be a consultant in this field/go into my own business and to have an MA plus significant work experience in the field will lend me a lot of credibility. I would basically have to pay only matriculation fees, for which I could get a hardship waiver for so I wouldn't have to get additional loans out. It's just been hard because I haven't gotten any support from my department or my job.