I just returned to the states a few weeks ago from a 5-month trip through Europe, Asia, and Australia and I don’t know how to feel. Just within these last 3 weeks, I’ve witnessed family, marriage, hardship, and isolation. There’s been an overload of emotion both productive and futile. When I want to zone out I do one of two things; work out or watch Netflix. The latter being where I want to start my story.

I’ve been binging episodes of Cheers for the last week or so, putting me back on that ever chugging procrastination train. But, it seems like through my procrastination I get some of my good ideas. It then just takes me a while to write them down… I’ve noticed that the characters in Cheers remind me a lot of my friends, my family, and me. You’ve got the playboy, the know-it-all, the functioning alcoholic, the recovering alcoholic, etc. It’s making me dwell on who I really want to be as a person and where I want to go. Though, I do feel as if I am a broken record at this point because I pose this question to myself on a daily basis.

I’ve just about completely slipped back into my old self while being back home and again I find it kind of depressing. It makes me wonder what exactly I have accomplished these past three years. I’ve definitely seen the world and have grown as a person but I believe it means nothing when I feel as if I am back to where I started. I have that always nagging thought way in the back of my head of ‘settling.’ That’s what you do when you get to a certain age, right? Well, I hate that word. It makes me think of giving up. I don’t want to give up and I will always be in constant search of new ideas, creativity, and the unknown.

But, watching the characters of Cheers I get a bit of FOMO seeing a group of friends in a cosy bar setting, more or less, getting along night after night. They each come to the bar with their new stories of the day while at the same time keeping their predictable natures about themselves. It’s a fun give and take that makes me jealous of the simple pleasures they seem to receive from their playful banter. I can see this in my friends, my family, and me sometimes. I want the new with the old and I don’t know how to get it. I want to be everywhere all at once. I am headed back to Dublin at the end of October and I am planning to stay for two months before coming back to Chicago for good, I think… Here’s to never ‘settling’ because if I did then the rest of my life would be really boring.