Day One

A new blog! I love the idea of a new blog. I've been traveling all day (went home for a few days) and this blog sort of popped into my head. During liftoff, I kept wording different posts, ideas I wanted to explore.

A little about myself:
I'm currently a student again, working on my Ph.D. Two years ago, I had left school with a Master's to live with my boyfriend. We got engaged and within 5 months he had passed away from weird complications from a common infection. Call it bad luck, karma, or God trying to punish us for living together before we were married... I call it life. My mom passed away the summer before my senior year in high school, and I had to take care of my little sister. Any ideas of going off to college went down the drain and I stayed in town to go to the little 4 year university. Do I regret it? No way! I think I had a great education, where the faculty knew us by name and still do to this day. I graduated 6 years ago and I can still pop in and say hello and chit chat. So, when my fiance passed away, I did what I had done before, I kept myself busy. I was working 2 full-time jobs and hardly had time to sleep. The time I did spend at home was taken up my dog, who had gotten pregnant while friends were watching her during the whole ordeal. To stay busy, I decided to go back to graduate school and finish my degree. Am I angry? A little. I was supposed to be married by now. We had just set a date a couple of weeks prior to his passing. Have I gotten over it? Not really. I can honestly say that I am "happy" at times. But the sadness seems to creep up on me on random days and it's hard to shake sometime.

Well, it has suddenly dawned on me that I'm 28 and well on my way to 30. 30 is my scary age right now. I always imagined that at 30 I would be thin, pretty, successful, married, with 2 kids, the whole white picket fence fantasy. 30 was when my life was going to magically fall into place. Instead, I'm overweight, still in school, in debt, single, no kids, living in an apartment with my dogs. Nothing I planned has panned out, and yet, it's the things that I DON'T plan that seem to work out the best. I never imagined I'd go away to graduate school, I had planned on staying in the area to go to school, but I got an application in the mail to my fantasy school and within a week I was accepted to go. I had liked my fiance since high school and it was when I had finally given up on him that he sent me a letter telling me he had feelings for me.

So, now what? Well, I am making the decision to better myself. I could stand to lose at least 100 pounds. I need to organize my finances and pay off my debt. I want to finish my degree and find a good job. And finally, I need to get to a place where dating someone else isn't so scary anymore.

This is my journey.