Roads in Life

Let me just start this post by saying I am deeply depressed since the snack machine down stairs just ate my hard earned dollar...I'm pretty sure I want to cry about it right now.

But anyways, I reunited with a friend of mine from high school the other day and got to reminisce about the old high school days.  I wasn't very popular in school but I had a group of friends I ran with and didn't have a lot of enemies (although I still had a few).  I changed my mind a hundred times about what I wanted to be or what I wanted to do in life.   I had great test scores and plenty of opportunities for scholarships.  I never could get a clear plan of how my life would work out because I couldn't decide what to do right after graduation.

But when it came time to walk the stage, I didn't have much time to plan my life anymore.  Within three weeks of graduating I had moved in with my boyfriend and became the breadwinner for an entire family.  I started junior college in the fall since I couldn't travel far to go to school.  I went to school in the morning and work at night.  I moved three times in a year. I worked two jobs for a while.  Damn it things were just hard until about two years after the fact, and then they were just hard in different ways!

But the point of my rambling is that I always wonder if I really took the right roads in life, or if I missed my turn completely. 

What would life be like if I had lived with my parents while going to college?
What if I moved away?
What if I had lived by myself, or even in the dorms?
What if I only had a job for me and saved all that money I could have made?
What if I didn't work at all through school and spent that time to just "find myself"?
What if I had left town and went to Austin college or studied abroad like I had wanted?

What if.....?  What if.....?  What if....?

The majority of people I knew in high school have grown up and gotten their own lives.  Most of them have children, or moved away, or in school getting a real degree.  What have I done?

I worked my butt off when I got out of high school, but for what?  I feel like I just ran in circles to come back to the same place I started at.  Instead of feeling like I came out ahead, I feel like I fell more behind...