Welcome to 25

I'm looking at my first full week of being 25. My birthday inevitably falls near Thanksgiving each year, offering an opportunity to give thanks for making it another year and for all of the love and kindness I receive on my birthday. This year is no different, but is it just me or are you supposed to have more figured out by the time you turn 25 - as though, even now it still feels like I'm playing at being an adult.

25th Birthday last week

My work at a non-profit in fundraising is both challenging at frustrating as hell. I so much want to be one of these 20-somethings that throw caution to the wind and go and travel about the world, but somehow I can't not worry about health insurance or having some sort of money cushion. I'm falling into a cycle that I can't get out of, where I want to be able to enjoy time being young and in good health and able to freely travel and want to advance in a career and choose safe options. This is not the best feeling.

Additionally, my job has gotten to a place of soul-sucking. I know I should not complain, I am so incredibly lucky to be 25 and prospering as well as I am. But, it is part of the human nature to want more. And God Almighty I want more. I want to not dread Sunday nights because I will inevitably be getting a barrage of emails from bosses and co-workers. I want to be able to walk away from my job on the weekends and days that I'm not working and not worry about it. Right now, the job is causing about as much anxiety as not having a job would cause. Again, not the best feeling. 

Hopefully, I will be able to focus on two major goals for this year. 1) A trip to England. 2) Applying and being accepted into a fellowship program in India. 

The trip to England, while seemingly frivolous, is very important to me for a few reasons. 

1. My parents named me for a woman named Gillian, who was one of my Dad's professors while he attended Oxford his junior year of college.  I did not know that much about her until the last 6 or so years. My Dad naturally doesn't talk about his past too much. I want to meet this woman who was important enough in my Dad's life for him to name his child after her. 
2. I have a good friend from college who is studying in London for her Master's degree for a year. I personally feel like that must be a hard transition and would appreciate someone I know to come and see me in this new environment. Also - and this idea is a bit more amorphous, but - I don't want to miss this opportunity to connect with her. Unrelated to this friend, I had a friend die, rather unexpectedly, two years ago. A month before his death, he invited me to his 21st birthday. It wasn't an overly personal invitation, just generally put out on Facebook. I could have gone that night, but I had gone to anther friend's party earlier that night and was feeling tired so I didn't make the effort to go. Before I could see him again he was dead. That experience has taught me, if nothing else, to make the effort as much as you can for the people you care about. Make the effort to see them, to check-in, to ask how they are. To be present in their lives. 
3. When I was in the 8th grade, my family and I hosted an exchange student from Ukraine. I've gone to visit her once in Kiev, but now she is in London. Basically, I want to continue to be in her life and her in mine. What better opportunity is this. 

Visiting Kiev Summer 2010

Frivolous maybe, but not without reason. 

This will be an expensive trip, but I hope worth it.

The fellowship program to India... well, that's less easy to discuss. Not because I don't want it, I do! I also have a very clear reason for why I want this program to this country. It's not easy to discuss because, well, I've already failed at it once. I applied to this exact program last year, was waitlisted and ultimately rejected. When I first applied, I promised myself that if I did not get an interview I wouldn't apply again, because I would have already submitted the best application I could and if they didn't like that, then there wasn't anything better I could submit. But then I was waitlisted and my rejection email was encouraging enough that I felt like I should apply again. So here we are again, answering the same questions for the same application. Hopefully, the reviewers will think I'm a more interesting candidate this time around, but who really knows. 

The point is, at 25, I'm looking at a landscape where I get to really make some decisions about who I am and what kind of life I'm going to lead. My Dad, now retired, how said often that he did not take the right career path in life. That he so wished he had had the ability to do what he really loved. I think he truly regrets many of his professional choices. I don't want that for me. But now, even scarier than knowing that I need to prevent the fall into a never-ending cycle of personal disappointment is the leap required to get myself on a path that I'm proud of. That's going to take some planning and thinking. Wish me luck.