I haven't been posting much to this blog lately - well, at least the public blog. (Friends of mine can access my LiveJournal, and every post on the main blog gets copied there.) There are two reasons for this.
First, until today, it's typically been either rainy or dark on the evenings and weekends. This is the first real sunny day I've seen in weeks, and the main blog is primarily a photo blog.
The other is depression and decision.
I switched medications form Setraline to Fluoxitine. Both do the same thing, but Setraline costs $150 a month while Fluoxitine, which is government subsidized even for people who don’t have residency, costs $15 a month. This is a no-brainer – except that the past two weeks have been hell while I’ve been going through withdrawal for Setraline, plus the underlying depression, plus waiting for the other to kick in.
I was so depressed, I considered leaving New Zealand and coming back to Austin. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but I have a support network of friends to help me through bad times in Austin – in Wellington, I haven’t developed them yet.
I’ve started to feel better about midweek. And I know what depression feels like and I know what sadness feels like – they’re two different emotions. Everyone gets sad at some point, but not everybody gets depressed.
And I’m sad.
Making friends in Wellington has not been easy. I got invited to a party on Friday, for example, by Woody – a good friend, but the exception that proves the rule. I showed up about a half an hour into the party, and everyone was, well, drinking.
By that, I don’t mean that people were drinking while enjoying other social activities. I mean, the entire focus of the evening was drinking. They played drinking games for a full hour; I waited that long for them to move on to something else but they never did. I would have drank as well, but I had to drive home. Which made me, once again, the wallflower.
Woody, by the way, didn’t show up until I left, a good 90 minutes after the party started – so I didn’t know anyone at the party, either.
I remember the last party I went to in Austin. I was slightly uncomfortable there, as always, and there was alcohol, but people talked about other things as well, and played games… I had never seen so much focus on drinking and getting drunk since my days in college in New Jersey.
What’s the point of this story?
The point is that I finally realize what’s bugging me – why I’m not fitting into the New Zealand culture. There really isn’t a whole lot of room for geeks and nerds here. That’s why there’s such a “brain drain” to Australia, I think.
Which means that I want to go home.
Of course, if you ask me on any single day whether I want to stay or go home, you’re likely to get yet another flip-flop on the answer. But what it comes down to is that the reason I’m *currently* staying in New Zealand is that I have a job here, and I don’t in Austin. I’m fairly sure that if I were to be given a job offer in Austin, I’d fly over and move immediately, but… and doesn’t irony have a cruel demeanor… nobody in Austin is going to hire anybody who can’t afford to come in for a face-to-face interview. Not in this climate. So I find myself in the EXACT same situation I’ve found myself in years ago when I wanted to move to New Zealand.
So far as I can tell, my options are to continue working until I’ve paid off all my debt, save up a little bit of money, then head back to Austin and start looking for work. This may take another 6 months to do, and I’m not happy about that. I think I finally know what I want, and now I feel trapped by my own decisions.
Posts
