Six-month review: How is adult life going?

I’ve been on my own––paying my own rent and utilities, feeding myself and my dog, maintaining my car, all of that stuff––for a little over six months now. And I had this utterly shocking revelation: it’s hard to be a grown-up. I’ve had to make sacrifices of things I want/want to do in favor of necessities. One of those sacrifices was riding. You know how much it sucks to not ride? A lot. Like, all of the suck.

Truly it’s nothing against the trainer I had started working with. I really liked the way she taught and I loved her farm and horses. But between the price of lessons and the amount of gas it took for me to get there and home, it wasn’t something I could justify at that point in time. It’s still tough, but I’m hoping things change soon because I found a barn I really like. I even have a horse available to me to free lease. So guys, please please please keep your fingers crossed for me that things keep going positively for me!

Work has been adventurous, to say the least. The clients are wonderful and the saddle experts are great as remote coworkers. It’s been a challenge for me to stay organized and get better about my “paperwork” skills. But looking at where I started compared to where I am now, there’s been some major improvements. What I have discovered is that there needs to be a system in place for there to be success among papers. Some people are really good at creating the system and implementing logic into chaos. That’s not me. My ability is adapting to a system and then changing it into my own system. So I take what exists and update it. So the last month or so, I’ve been adjusting my processes to be much more streamlined. (That means maybe I won’t have to work ten extra hours a week anymore, at least not all the time!)

If you had asked me this time last year where I would be, “desk job” would have been the farthest thing from my mind. It’s definitely never been in my line of thinking before now. But guys, I got really lucky here. My coworkers in the office are awesome people, and I’ve developed strong bonds with all of them. We have a lot of laughs but still accomplish a lot more than any more conventional office should. Plus, I get free French lessons, for lack of a better word. I took two years of French in high school but I’ve learned significantly more French from my coworkers than I ever could in a classroom.  One of the clients I spoke to this morning told me that my French accent was very good, even despite my southern accent. Thank you, I think?

Other useless office skills I’ve learned include the following:

• removing staples without a staple remover
• how to not tear paper when removing it from a stapled stack
• the correct way to use paper clips in a large stack of papers
• true multitasking, like over 9000 type multitasking
• keeping rubber bands from breaking when attempting to hold together large groups of large documents
• nearly perfected my method for plugging in a USB cord the right way on the first try
• snack hiding and storage
• the easiest way to politely end a phone call (honestly, kind of a life skill)
• just about everything contained in our printer drivers except how to change the goddamn default setting

It was a rough start to adulthood, to living in Florida. I mean, it was really rough. It was really hard to be away from my friends and family, and I never thought I would ever be so homesick for Georgia.  But things have been improving the last two months. I’m making friends and getting comfortable. It’s not quite home in Florida, but I’m lucky to work for Groupe Voltaire. They’ve really become a family to me. It’s comforting to know that they like me as much as I like them, heehee. One of the best parts of working for a horse company is that I’m not that weird horse girl in the office. I can talk about eventing or a big name rider and everyone knows what I’m saying. Especially in a multilingual office, having the common language of horses really strengthens that family feeling.