maybe

I thought I wasn't the "complaining" kind of person, but then all I did throughout the first semester was complain - and I still catch myself in the middle of a conversation, complaining about things or people. This is not a good sign, and I'm sure it makes me rather boring. But then, having mottos obviously doesn't help. I know for a fact that I wasn't a whiner even through the hardest times - unemployment, family crises, cancer - but maybe I should have talked more about the things that I tried so hard to ignore. Maybe, certain things are coming back to haunt me and I can't handle them anymore. Maybe, just maybe, I should have complained at the right time to the right person so that I wouldn't become a whiner when there really isn't anything serious to complain about.

And if that had happened, maybe I wouldn't have sent a complaint to my parents and my sister out of the blue, and then my sister wouldn't have blamed me for the things that I didn't even know, and maybe... I don't know, and I never will, since this is the way we have lived so far, and this is where we have come.

So, what happened in the past five months... Well, it's happened and it's gone now. Living in a 4th-floor walk-up may not be the American dream, but I like my apartment, my room, my roommate, and every little bit of thing in my private space - from the pictures on the walls to the candies on my desk. I am very much at peace with the idea of spending 16 more months here - even though it looks like I'm counting the days left.

Going home for two weeks during the winter break did help. Maybe I was depressed - I had never even been close to depression, but maybe I was this time (oh so many maybe's!), at 30 years of age, and I needed to go back to familiar grounds, to reset. No matter what, I'm glad I did it.

So now I'm refreshed, energized, definitely less depressed. New York is the same old city, but now I see it differently. It seems like the spring is going to be a lot more fun than the winter. I can't wait to see.