don't let me get me

I've always heard that life was about choices. Ever since I was a kid, it's a saying that's been hammered so deeply into my brain that I can't even remember who was the perpetrator of the verbal assault.

Life is about choices.

In my depression-ridden 17-year old brain, choices also equated sacrifice. It meant that I would, continuously, have to do things that I don't like doing in order to do things that I wanted to do. The concept became a familiarity to me--I did a lot of things I didn't like doing to ensure that every now and then, I'd get to do something I loved to do. Working crazy overtime for 4 months, for instance, to pay a trip to Cuba.

Choices meant sacrifices.

Nobody ever warned me that when you get older, sometimes choices have you bound and gagged in a place where you're forced to choose between two things you love so much--because where one is, the other doesn't exist.

Those are the worst choices, because you never win.

To say that I've been unhappy since returning from Halifax would be an understatement. I am downright miserable. Fed up. So over Montreal and the life I lead in it. So angry and depressed and constantly at war with myself because I'm just never happy anymore.

And when I'm alone with my monsters and I force myself to think and to analyze, to really dig down deep--I realize the only time in my life where I have been happy--and I mean happy--was when I lived in Halifax.

Was I running away from something there? Trying to trick myself into finding a false sense of happiness, secure in the certainty that it's easy to find happiness in something with an expiry date on it? No. I thought maybe that was the case when I came back to Montreal, so I stewed over it. Mentally beat myself up over it. Tore the curtain off my eyes and forced myself to really think.

I wasn't running away in Halifax. I wasn't even looking for something. But I sure did discover what I never even knew I was missing. And now I can't let it go.

Halifax felt like home. By no means is it paradise, but paradise is nowhere perfect and everywhere that just feels so right. I was just happy there.

So now, I'm stuck in a job that I hate, bound in a cubicle that I want to set fire to. My life is a mess of 9-5 mundane work shifts with hour lunch breaks and no energy left to do anything else. I'm living in a city that sucks the little spark I have left right out of me--a city where people slam doors in your faces and hurry from A to B and individuals become faceless masses.

Last week was the 7th anniversary since my grandpa passed away. Life seems short to me right now. And I'm wondering, that if life is indeed about choices--then why am I still here? Why am I wasting precious time--even a second--being in a place where I don't want to be?

I'm still here because life is exactly about choices, and I have to choose between two loves.

I have wanted to work in the NHL for a long, long time. The few tastes I get in the industry make me drunk with anticipation. I get so fired up over that league. Working the Winter Classic was an experience I will never forget, and every single time I work for Hockey Night in Canada, I am delirious with happy. I'm actually giddy over it, because it's such a trip for me.

Halifax is the only place I can call home. The feeling I get there is second to none. I am happy there. The ocean, the people, the atmosphere, the ambiance--everything about Halifax just reaches out and captures me in it's embrace. My gut feeling is yelling at me to go there. I'm big on instincts and mine are on fire about that city. It's calling me. Telling me to pick up and move there. It's saying that I don't have it all figured out, but nobody ever does and things will work out exactly the way they're suppsoed to. It's asking me why I'm wasting time being unhappy, when the choice is mine to make.

It would seem fitting, then, that one can't exist with the other. Where one is, the other isn't.

Halifax does not have an NHL team. It probably never will.

So, what's an almost-mid-twenties girl to do? My heart is screaming at me to go to Halifax. But my heart's worse enemy--my logic--is asking the tough questions. You can't live life on instinct, you'll end up homeless and in a box. People need to live. You need to have a job, make money, have a place to sleep.

I do not work in the NHL full time right now. But, I do have the opportunity to do really important contract work that I'm hoping--HOPING--will one day turn into a full time gig. Moving to Halifax would mean totally removing myself from a world I'm partially involved in. But partial is better than none, and if I leave now, I may never get another chance.

But I may never get a chance if I stay in Montreal, either.

Do I leave my big-girl job, go with the feeling that life is too short to live even a second in a place where you don't want to be, and figure it all out when I get there? Or do I stay, unhappy for the moment, but hope that one day it will get better? That one day I'll get a shot and all this misery will seem worth it?


Life is about choices. And I've always made bad ones.