One More Season

After this summer I am transferring to a local college in the Philadelphia area. I've been having a hard time with this decision, because in essence, I have to return to the small town where I grew up.
When I started this blog in September, it was so I would have a place to put my thoughts about my anxiety. Of course, through the year the worst of it never made its way onto here, because I was having a hard enough time living with it. Having to read about it or allow the few people who read this blog AND know me in reality understand the true extent of the issue just seemed like too much to deal with, on top of everything else. It still is.
My anxiety has basically made it impossible for me to function when I am in the New York area. There were days where I just wouldn't go to class, because having to get out of bed just felt like too much to deal with. I come home every weekend because most of the time its the only time I can relax enough to feel semi-normal. My body needs the two or three day rest from the ridiculous amount of stress and panic I put it through during the week.
Because of this, I applied to a local college as a commuter student. Not that I am largely opposed to dorming, but because the original consideration towards this transfer was to make the college expenses easier to handle.
I am disappointed that I'm going to have to live at home. Of course, I miss my family and my friends and I enjoy myself here immensely. But living by my own schedule, worrying about feeding myself and buying my own groceries and learning how to cook using a microwave and how to unclog a sink and clean bathrooms and make a schedule and take public transportation- these are all things that I got to feel good at. I got a taste of living by myself. And the realization that I'm going to have to move back to my childhood bedroom under my parent's roof, as great as my parents are, is frustrating. The realization that I have to do this because of my own personal weakness and mental illness is even more crushing, because I feel as if I should have seen it coming.
Of course, by moving back home I'll be able to find a steady job, and use the closeness and consistency of Philadelphia to my advantage. Hopefully within a few years I will have saved up enough money to move out (because the original plan has fallen flat) and I'll manage to live nearby, and re-obtain the ability to take care of myself.
Until then, I have to work on this new issue. I have to learn to live with an anxiety that has the ability to disrupt my daily life. Moving back home and transferring feels like I'm giving up right now, but I have to be honest to myself and recognize that graduating is more important than taking the next six years to attempt to get an education while I battle with myself. Its a shitty realization, but there isn't all that much that I can realistically do about it.