Doubt.

This morning, as I was brushing my teeth, I looked out the bathroom door and saw a large roach staring back at me, like that scene in "Beetlejuice." You know the one I'm talking about? Where Beetlejuice turns into a roach and is like "Hey, how ya doin'?" in his gloriously deep and scuzzy Michael Keaton voice.

So I did what anyone would do. I let out a small scream and stomped on it. Then I checked high and low for signs of others, which I did not find. I know roaches are pretty commonplace in New York. I do. The fact that I live in a basement doesn't help the situation. BUT I just checked my lease again this morning, and it's in the rider that every form of vermin was supposed to be treated for with poison last week before I moved in. I bought stuff this morning, and yes, the roach I squashed was (hopefully, please God) just a straggler. I'm already over it. Once again, I am filled with doubt.

I needed to take this apartment. I had a week to decide and a small budget already creaking under debt. The neighborhood is good, and safe, and filled with friends. I can afford it. Most places for a person living alone, in less developed neighborhoods, were at least $200-$300 more expensive before utilities. In every way, it made perfect sense. However, the cheap, sexist scumbag that is my landlord, his rude lackey plumber (the Hasidic Napoleon Dynamite), and his blustering bullshitter of a super ("I been at dis building fuh 15 yeahs!") have combined to form a trifecta of pains-in-my-ass. They are in my phone, respectively as "slumlord" "fucktard" and "useless" and will remain as such. I am done being polite and respectful. I'm fine if they think I'm a bitch. Maybe I am. But this time I'm ready to own it. Because fuck all the rest of these people.

More than once, I've been told "just leave" but that does nothing but frustrate me, because this isn't fucking YOLO and that's not a practical way to live. To up and break a lease (to which I am legally bound) and take off for who knows where with no job, car, or savings is the stupidest possible solution. I made a commitment to this job, so I am honoring it. And it will benefit me in the long run to get some real work at a respectable company under my belt. So no, I won't "just leave" even if you think that's the best solution. In this instance, running away isn't a solution. The solution is growing up and dealing with it.

A shadow of doubt looms over every important decision I have made in the last four years (since my return stateside), and they all feel "wrong" despite (obviously) not knowing how things would have turned out to the contrary. Yet the time has yielded no decisions or events that I deem to be "great ideas" or "I'm so glad I did that." I doubt my decision-making capabilities in their entirety. Je Ne Regrette Rien? Non, I regret everything. Where I went, what I did and who I loved. How hard I tried (not enough?) and what happened. It's crushing. I make decisions with a combination of head and heart. I listen to my gut. Obviously my gut and I don't share a common language. If I had it to do all over again, I would. I'd change everything. But I can't and acknowledge if you get too caught up in that shit you might as well stick your head in the oven and call it a day. I don't trust myself to make any decisions that won't blow up in my face. And so far...I have zero evidence to the contrary.

So how do you move forward with your life, deeply saddened by how you've lived a chunk of it? One more year. At some point, I'll call it eight months, then six, and so on. By then I will have completed my commitment to this job, and hopefully moved into either a more creative department within the same company or onto something else. My resume will be fuller, more impressive. I will have great contacts. I will go somewhere else, a place where every neighborhood isn't haunted by ghosts of fuck-ups past. It's the clean start looming on the horizon that gets me through. I will continue to make wrong decisions, but if I simply accept things for how they are, then I deserve to stay miserable. The only way is forward. It can't come soon enough.