I'm kind of living with my worst mistake at the moment.
I'm young and live with my girlfriend. No, she's not my mistake - she's the greatest girl I could ask for.
We are both liberal arts majors with not many marketable skills, but a few years ago we both landed jobs in workers comp and we're working our way up. We lived in Sacramento and living was cheap. We had a decently sized apartment in the most fun part of town and we were getting paid a good wage with full benefit coverage, a healthy vacation plan, and retirement. At both jobs, our companies loved us and saw a future with us. I was going to be in line for managerial training, she was on her way to becoming a full-time adjuster. We had both been working long enough to where our jobs were more than happy to give us some extra time off and work with us on our sometimes weird schedule. We both do art on the side - she makes giant sculptures and puppets, I help her out and I am learning to work with electronics and LEDs.
Sacramento, California is a town without much of an identity. It has basketball, beer, and food.... But lacks in things like nightlife, music, and art. We were pretty submerged into the local scenes and kept pretty busy, but we both kept making the trip out to Oakland or San Francisco for weekend getaways. All of our favorite things - diverse music, excellent night life, thriving underground - were located in the Bay Area.
So we decided to move there. We tried for SF or Oakland, since both cities are diverse hubs of culture and city living. We know both areas well, with friends and acquaintances living all around the Bay and letting us crash down there constantly. We had grown tired of the insular Sacramento scene, the generally suburban feel of the entire region, and the lack of cultural identity.
I hunted down a job and was able to use my connections at work to get my girlfriend and interview (followed by a job) in the area. We hunted down an apartment, and despite paying over 2x our old rent, managed to find a much bigger place with a spare bedroom that was cheaper than most single bedrooms or studios we were finding. It wasn't as centrally located as we would have liked, but it allowed her to commute to work via bus and me to bike to work quickly as well. It all seemed great.
We've been here for awhile now, and quality of life is down across the board. Even though we both got considerable raises at our new jobs, we really underestimated the expenses of living out here. Everything is considerably more expensive, much more than anticipated. Rent and cost of living alone makes it so we are actually making a lot less in the grand SF We've gone from being able to spend cash going out every weekend along with a few trips to the Bay Area every month and weekly visits to our favorite restaurants to living nearly paycheque to paycheque. All of the reasons that we moved out here for are now things we cannot afford.
The Bay Area infrastructure is crumbling under the weight of NIMBYism and car-centric development. On top of this, living in a transit-oriented walkable neighborhood is reserved only for those who can afford 2000+ per month for one bedroom, which is far out of our range. We are not able to get around as easily as we thought, and the differences between taking public transportation on a Saturday evening and taking it on a Tuesday morning are like night and day. What was thought to be a relaxing bus ride to work is a stuffed tuna can, and my bike ride of the same distance compared to Sacramento cuts through some of the most dangerous parts of Oakland, not to mention the complete lack of bike infrastructure. I'd either get shot or pop a tire. Now I drive on crumbling roads that are consistently over-capacity, through weird parts of town. Last week I was stuck behind a sideshow, which is an Oakland thing where people do donuts in the street and other forms of car acrobatics... Blocking traffic the entire time.
On top of all of this, we both hate our jobs. Mine gives me totally random hours, and it's in an intense mental health environment that I am honestly unable to endure. She is working in a depressing tiny office with a draconian rule set. We never see each other anymore. She wakes me up when she leaves for work early in the morning since I work generally later hours, and we fight when I get home because she has been home for four or five hours and wants to hang out and I'm just getting off my shift after dealing with severely mentally disturbed individuals and I just want to sit and stare and relax.
On top of that, the culture of the Bay Area hates transplants... Especially transplants who move to a cheaper part of town chasing low rent.... Which is exactly who we are. Transplants chasing low rent.
Adulthood is weird. It takes a lot more careful thinking and planning than I thought. This has been a very tough few months, but I'm learning a lot about myself and how I work. It's funny, when I was fourteen, I knew everything. When I was eighteen, I was a genius. Now that I'm in my late 20s, I know absolutely nothing. It's frightening sometimes, and the lessons are much harder than when I was younger. Being grounded for a week is leaps and bounds better than sitting on my computer at midnight, crunching numbers and realizing that all of the trips we wanted to take this year are now impossible, the one special event we attend every year is now unattainable, and we aren't going to be able to enjoy any of the possible benefits of a new job in a new city because we didn't think far enough ahead. Not to mention the lapse in insurance, lack of other benefits, and no retirement plan at either new job.
Perhaps the strongest lesson I've extracted from all of this is that sprinting while you're young is fun, but as you get older, you need to take carefully planned steps. Even if you fall when you're young, you can get back up pretty easily... But here I am, stuck in a year lease, stuck with an Internet contract, and other roots keeping us from just applying a quick band aid.
This has been long, meandering, and boring. I apologize. I just needed to vent. It's a pretty silly first-world-problem we have, but knowing that neither of us will be getting a good vacation, that we have to cancel travel and family plans, and that we will never see each other during the week and having no money to have fun on the weekends is a bit draining on the psyche.