Doing it Wrong

As I sit around and look at all the people around me, I can't help but feel like I'm doing this whole  life thing wrong. Everyone is in relationships (happy or unhappy relationships - regardless, they have someone special in the life), moving in together, getting married, having babies. People are in their careers, advancing to better jobs, giving up the old bullshit for the new awesomeness. And where am I? I'm stuck here - living alone, being alone, being miserable in my thankless job. It's not for lack of trying. I've put out more resumes than I can recall, and while last year there were a slew of promising interviews, this year remains nothing but silence. 

So what am I doing wrong?

I've been trying to like Philadelphia, really I have. And I've been trying to date and give people the benefit of the doubt. But the more nothing goes the way I see it going for others, I really have to wonder if maybe it's really just me. I'm what's wrong in this equation. I have dreams and principles and goals set for myself and my future that I'm not willing to compromise - is that really so wrong? There are things that I feel in my heart and my gut that I know are right - things that I know that I can do, tasks that I can legitimately accomplish - but nothing is propelling my life into motion; the pieces to the puzzle just always seem to be missing.

I am rapidly approaching 30 and with it brings along this wide-eyed sense of panic and anxiety. I don't know where I wanna go or who I wanna be or what I wanna do. Every day I'm on to a new thought or idea or city or state or country; I could move to X and do Y. I don't have a problem picking up and starting over - it's the part that happens after I get there that's going to be difficult. All I really want is to just be happy. To wake up in the morning and not hate where I am or where I'm going, what I have to do or who I have to see. Do people really have that? Do people really, genuinely, truly wake up in the morning loving every single little aspect of their lives? To not have regrets that they wish they had gone here, done this, tried that. To not have all this fear of moving forward to the exciting and new because they are too scare to let go of the past, the safe, the familiar.

Friends in long term relationships are moving in together, trying to find the perfect living spaces in which to combine all their things, posting the totally cool, quirky wall art of that thing they both like. Or the pictures of their fridge covered in pictures of that trip they once took. Well, I tried that whole "living together" thing once and it didn't go so well, and the thought of putting that much of myself on the line, the merging of things, even if I know in my heart that this other person would never do me wrong, still feels unnerving and makes me break out into a cold sweat of sharing an apartment with anything bigger then a ladybug.

As friends marry and have babies and post pictures of said babies on social media sites, I feel these little twinges of the hetero-normative pulling and prodding. "Find a husband, have a baby - happy wife, happy life." Being married, pregnant, raising children? These are not the ideals I see for myself, and ultimately it becomes my cross to bear as I see others finding happiness in these simple milestones and wonder if maybe, I just compromised my own beliefs, that I could find that happiness too. 

But I know I won't. I would never be happy just trying to fit the mold. I know I'm going to be amazing one day. I'm bound for glory. But can it just hurry up and get here already? Because I'm really starting to get worried that I'm fucking it up.