life update 8/3

Waow! It's been a few months. A really good few months. 

I passed my licensure exam. I took a full time position and they offered me $7/hour more than I thought they would, so I am making more money than I anticipated. 

I moved into a really bougie apartment building. I've lived in student housing the last six years through my undergraduate and master's, so it's nice to live some where that is not. PLUS I have. walk in closet (yay!) and my own bathroom (first time eva!). 

I started going out seriously with one of the people I was casually seeing. It's my first time going out with someone who also has a degree and works and doesn't do drugs and overall fits into my life nicely. I did a lot of self-reflection over my last break-up on why all my relationships go the way they do, and came to the conclusion that i have cripplingly low self-esteem and tend to date people that I think would want me instead of people that I would want. Not that I didn't like anyone I've been with in the past, I was deeply deeply in love with my ex-boyfriend, but that on paper none of them aligned with the things that I would say that I wanted. So I decided this time to not date from a "there's no way they'd ever like me" perspective, and just let things happen as they do. 

I still have devastatingly low self-esteem. And that is going to impact my life and my relationships, so if anyone has advice on what to do about that, that would be great. I looked into getting therapists for it, but there isn't really a reason my self-esteem is so low -- it just is. I did trauma therpay in the past and it really helped to address that and those behaviors, but it never did anything for the self-esteem component. I have always found myself to be a deeply unlikeable person. So, the next big project in my life is to work on building up my self-esteem. Wish me luck!