Do not pass go. I repeat. Do not pass go.

When I moved back to New York two years ago, I felt that my life was about to change dramatically. I knew it was going to be the year of the relationship – the one that would show me about love, about compromise, about being a girlfriend. I knew it was going to be the time I learned more about myself than I had ever known – which indeed I did – just not necessarily in a good way. I thought I would zip through my master’s, find a job, find love, and live the perfect New York City life.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I did find that relationship – convoluted, and complicated by distance. I did find me, but I lost me more in the process. And my master’s? Well. It’s still here, hanging on a thesis about literary celebrities. The motivation to write doesn’t come as easily as I wish.

I was convinced that New York City would be the destination of all my adventures and tales, the fodder to my fiction. In some ways, it was. But it wasn’t until I decided my stories needed more color that I made the decision to leave. It was just a year ago that I was packing my bags, saying goodbye to my East coast family and friends, and boarding a plane to Oakland, via Dallas-Fort Worth. In some ways, it doesn’t really faze me that I moved across country by myself, not knowing a soul – because that’s who I was. I’m an adventurer. I’m bold and brave and exciting and new and there’s always a good story to be told when I’m around.

As the story goes, California chewed me up and spit me back out. And it took some of my self-esteem with it. I fought it by traveling, as though running from it could somehow preserve my sense of ambition and pride.

What no one ever tells you is that sometimes, moving forward feels like taking ten steps back. My step backwards involves a return to the mall of my high school dread. I think it’s more the feeling of inferiority – of “How can I show people that I really am someone still? That I still am doing something with my life, and I’m not just working here because I have no ambition to do more with my life?” There’s no way to really wear a badge that says, “Look at everything I’ve done in the last year! Or the last two years! Or even the last six!” and instead, I feel like I must justify myself to all the college kids working there during summer vacations.

It’s made harder still when so much of my high school years were spent looking ahead to the future, to when I could leave this little po-dunk section of New Jersey with horse farms and hunting on the weekends. I cringe when I think about someone from high school, or one of my professors from college walking into my current retail job and thinking, “She had so much potential!” I know I shouldn’t feel so self-conscious about this change of life plans, but I wanted to leave New Jersey so badly, it’s painful to be back here and working a transition job until I decide what to do next.

I never used to care much what people think of me, but I think a large part of it was how confident I felt about myself and what I was doing. My confidence these days is a pretense, hidden behind books and brief dialogue. I long for the days when there was a spring in my step, when being social came easy to me, when a comment from a rogue customer wouldn’t have my insecurities firing up a storm. When I was confident that my future, as unclear as it may have been, still held promise for me. It is getting easier to see the light at the end of the tunnel, to be cliched, now that I do have money coming in again, and now that I do have an internship that may better direct me towards where I want to be. I don’t promise to know where I want to be in a month, let alone six months, but it’s something.

I know that ultimately, this is just a step. That everything I’ve done up to this point is just preparation and I’ll find ways to use it somehow. But it’s awfully hard to remember that when I wake up in the morning and realize again how far the plot has diverged from the story I once wrote for myself.