Now that hermit life is coming to an end, I am naturally feeling reflective. A short but important phase of my life will soon be over. It is, notably, the last phase of my life that came pre-planned, which means that on top of reflective, I am also feeling utterly terrified. When experiencing either of those emotions, I find it is a good idea to make lists. So here is a list of things I accomplished during hermit life:

• I got an agent! A really cool agent whom I will hopefully get to meet in person after hermit life. This happened at the beginning of hermit life, which I took as a sign that this whole weird live-in-the-woods idea was the right thing to be doing, because I am extremely prone to magical thinking. This was also the crowning achievement of 2014, which I’m beginning to think of as “the year I made a lot of really cool things happen.”
• I completed a set of revisions for story at the behest of said agent. I absolutely marathoned that work, which made me feel busy and slightly frantic and very writerly. I love the feeling of making a story I love better.
• I submitted myself to getting my ass kicked by werewolf story enough times that it finally got tired and allowed me to wrestle it into a draft that I can (finally) work with. I finished this draft last week, thereby completing my Last Writing Goal of Hermit Life.
• I survived a mouse infestation, a poor dying snake, the absence of all sunlight for the entire month of December, unbearably cold temperatures, getting my car stuck in a snow bank (twice), my pipes freezing (twice), and the aforementioned six-month-long ass kicking by werewolf story.

Here is a list of things I did not accomplish during hermit life:

• Figuring out what I’m going to do after hermit life.

So, whoops.

In my defense, it’s not for lack of trying. I have submitted oh so very many job applications, and I will be continuing to do so as soon as I finish this blog post. (And actually, I can also add “went to a ridiculous amount of trouble to get to an interview that turned out to be a complete bust” to the list of things I survived.) I am trying awfully hard to mold a shape for my immediate future. But unfortunately, at the moment, it remains a void.

So this means that Awkward Home Summer will have a reprise in Awkward Home Early Spring, but while I hope a new job comes quickly, if it doesn’t, I won’t be waiting around too long to move somewhere else. I’ll need to, because in a lot of ways, hermit life was completely successful. I knew that I needed some time away from the world after grad school, that I wasn’t yet ready to take on all aspects of Real Adulthood. I am now, though. I want a semi-permanent place to live (or at least general location), a social life again, a love life even, and a non-writing-paid-job that I feel is contributing to the world in some positive way. I’m ready. But all of these new beginnings sort of hinge on finding the last item in that list, and that’s what I haven’t managed to do yet.

It is very frustrating to be ending something without beginning something else.

And I know it will happen, because something has to happen and I’m going to make it happen. I just don’t know when. So that’s unpleasant. Also, the “positive contribution” part is another thing I hate waiting on, as you’ve probably gleaned from my last post if you read it or from my general desperate existential anxiety if you’ve had any sort of conversation with me in 2015. In a beautiful ideal world, I would be a paid writer with time to do volunteer work, but writing + paid job + substantial volunteer work = no sleep for Kathleen, so I’m trying to squish the last two parts of that equation together. (General plea: if you know any nonprofits or really positive for profits looking for entry level workers remotely near New York or Philly or anywhere in New Jersey or I’ll take some Connecticut too, and you can put in a good word for me because I have literally zero networking connections, let me knooooow.) (I’ll love you for eternity and be forever in your debt if you know of something even tangentially related to the environment.) (Or schools, too.)

So that’s where I am: frustrated and anxious about all areas of my life — except for writing. And that’s where I find comfort, because I knew I wouldn’t switch it. I couldn’t switch it, because I could not possibly be content about any aspect in my life if I’m not giving my all to writing. While I always wish I had more time to write, I know that I have spent hermit life working as hard as I could to produce work I am very proud of. In the void of my future, I at least have a direction for werewolf story (research computer hacking, plant biology, and corporate accounting, and then start a new draft that (sob!) cuts one of the secondary characters). And no matter what I wind up doing next, I have other stories waiting for me to write them.