So what happens next? I just declined a job offer in NYC, something I never could have imagined I would do. There were so many conflicting voices fighting to be heard. The voice that told me that I deserved to be making a normal middle class salary working for a very profitable firm. The voice that told me that I should be earning more to live in NYC than I earn to live in Rhode Island where I live paycheck to paycheck. How could I possibly have made that work?

And then there was the voice that told me that I am an artist and I am supposed to be poor and I should try to find a shared living situation in a completely non-gentrified part of Brooklyn or Queens or NJ. Why am I so bourgeois? That’s not who I am supposed to be. What am I doing? Denying myself the life I was born to live. Who do I think I am?

That’s the big question. That’s the one question I can’t answer.

Now that I’ve made the decision, 2 decisions in fact because I also had to decide today whether or not I would be renewing my lease in Providence, it’s been a night of regret. I don’t even like Providence. What the fuck am I doing? Declining a life in a place where I could truly connect for a place where I have no connection at all.

I think I am now beginning to understand who I am. I am the great saboteur of my own happiness. And this saboteur infuriates me. Almost as bad as Trump.