Various forums that I read and/or post at have had threads lately asking the following questions:
1) What were you doing 10 years ago?
2) What do you want to be doing 10 years from now?
I find these questions to be very intriguing so I am going to answer them myself right in this here blog and then I invite my loyal readers (all two of you!) to answer these questions yourself in the comments section of this post.
Me 10 years ago:
I was 22 years old and had been dating Scott for nearly 3 years, and we had just gotten engaged with plans to marry the following year (which we did, BTW). We had been living together for close to a year at that point in a very cool building right here in Superior. Both of my brothers lived in the same building (I'm such a cool big sister, you know, and they couldn't bear to be away from me. ;-) )
I was also attending the University of Wisconsin-Superior, majoring in Sociology with a minor in Women's Studies, and I was working at a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. The things that I remember most about my life 10 years ago are consuming large amounts of Long Island Teas on a very regular basis, hanging out with Scott and a group of friends that we were very close with at the time, and occasionally making it to class in between all of the hours that I was putting in at the group home. I really like my job at the time, although I am not sure that I could do that type of work again.
Besides all of the drinking and hanging out with friends that I was doing I was dealing with a pretty serious bout of depression. I had dealt with depression on and off through high school, but it was never anything too serious. Then when I was 18 and just months out of high school I went through what I view now as the hardest months of my entire life. I'm not ready to blog here publicly about what exactly went down, but least to say it was life changing for me, and it triggered a very serious depression in me that I was still heavily dealing with 10 years ago.
My plans for the future 10 years ago included: marrying Scott, finishing my bachelor's degree, going to graduate school to get my Master's in Women's Studies, and spending the rest of my life helping people. I wanted to join the Peace Corps and then move to D.C. to fight for women's rights, both in within our country and internationally. Children were not even on my radar 10 years ago. Of course, most of my plans have not come to fruition, which is a whole other blog for another day. ;-)
Me 10 years from now:
This is really hard for me to even think about to be honest. In the last 10 years of my life I have learned that nothing ever goes as planned and I often feel like there is no point in thinking about life so far down there road. However, for the sake of discussion, I'll give it a try!
In 10 years Scott and I will be preparing to celebrate our 19th wedding anniversary, and our children will be 17 (eek!!), 15 (more eek!), 13, and 11. I am guessing that I will be in the thick of thinking about college and grad pictures and proms. I hope to have a photography business of some sort going with a studio/office located right in my own home. Speaking of my home, I hope that in 10 years we will have a bigger house, maybe with some acreage, away from the sounds of the railroad tracks whose trains wake us up at all hours of the night.
In 10 years I want to be able to look back on the last decade and know that I have made a difference in my community. (I'm not sure how just yet....I'm still working on that.) I want to organize a women's music festival for the Duluth/Superior area with a friend of mine (Hi, Melanie!) and I hope that in 10 years it will have become a successful, annual event. In 10 years I'd also like to have some essays and articles published, and maybe a photo or two.
That's about all I can think of now. How about you?
About Me
- The Finn Family
- More than anything this blog is for us; for our own little family. As the days and months and years pass by we find ourselves forgetting many of the wonderful times that our family has shared. This blog is our way of documenting and helping us to remember.
2 comments:
Wow. Ten years ago I was moving in with my friend Lisa and her daughter Ariyana, age 9 months. My first experience with "parenting." Ha. I was also teaching high school English at my old high school, which was a hugely weird experience. (Oh, wait, I guess that's more like nine years ago...try again.) OK, TEN years ago I was...uh...yeah, that year is fuzzier. David and I were living together while I worked at a local private school as a full time substitute teacher and after-school program director. David worked nights and weekends, so we basically only saw each other asleep. We had a crazy roommate who lost a bunch of weight and every lovable part of her personality along with it. I was filled with wanderlust and angst. (So maybe kind of typical 22 year old?)
My dream ten years from now involves me teaching part time during the school year and living/writing from a wilderness cabin which is off the grid yet internetted in the summers, with my two boys (11 and 14, Oh mah gawd!) rambling in the woods learning how to use their imaginations to amuse themselves and becoming fine young men in the process. I'd like to have about three books published by then, and a couple in the works, you know. I'd like for David to be engaged in something that makes him happy and fulfilled, whether that is his photography, wilderness management, or whatever he wants, but I'd like it best if his schedule were flexible enough to allow us to travel, camp, and hike together as a family very often.
All in all, Shana, life is so much better at 32 than it was at 22, and I can only hope it keeps up the same general trend! :D
10 years ago. Hmmm, I was working at MCI (Mennonite Collegiate Institute) as a Residencial Dean. I was dealing with generalized anxiety disorder and taking a course for it. It was a Cognitive Behaviour therapy course and I still use some of the skills I learned! I was loosing weight, working out, and actually feeling pretty good. Chris was a co-workder at the time but was not really on my radar yet. Although late in the year of 1998 my interst was piqued and my March of 1999 we were dating. I was 25, Chris was 34 and by March of 1999 we were dating March of 2000, married!
10 years from now. I would like to persue some doula training. I think maybe photography could work it's way into that somehow, not sure. I'm open to see where the road goes, but it's weird to think of my kids being that old! I hope that we will have an established income so we can take some family trips and that Chris and I will be able to do some travelling by ourselvs.
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