The current phase of my life is officially ten years old today. It was ten years ago today that I packed up my car, left Charlottesville, Virginia, for good, and moved back up to the New York area.

I just did a search of my blog for the phrases “ten years” and “10 years” and there’s a lot that came up. I’m very interested in the passage of time, and I’m self-analytical, so I’m often noting how much time has passed between different events in my life.

I wrote a similar post about this a few months ago, to commemorate ten years since I’d graduated from law school. But it was ten years ago today that, after graduating from law school, studying for the bar exam all through June and July, driving up to Albany to take the exam, and driving back to Charlottesville to wind things up and sell my furniture, I officially closed the Virginia phase of my life. I had spent eight eventful years there, but I was long past ready to leave and move back to the big city.

On the evening of August 4, 1999, I arrived back at my parents’ house in New Jersey after the seven-hour drive from UVa. I had no job lined up. I was not yet out to my parents. Living with my parents, unemployed and closeted, was not fun. That first night back home, I went online and this guy struck up a conversation with me. He was 21, I was 25. He was cute, smart, and Jewish. I was instantly smitten. The next night, we met up, and I was really smitten, although nothing sexual happened. Nothing remotely sexual would ever happen between us. It was the beginning of 2-3 months of confusion, angst, and heartbreak. (Which was fine, because he was all wrong for me anyway.) It also led to me finally coming out to my parents (for the second time), because one night my mom confronted me about this “new friend” I’d been spending time with, and the unspoken truth was finally spoken.

The year from August 1999 to August 2000 was filled with flailing around, false starts, feelings of transition. I got a non-law job with a family friend in Princeton, found a roommate in Princeton who turned out to be horrible, and then moved in with a friend of mine. Finally, in the summer of 2000, I got a response to a resume I’d sent to the New Jersey court system a year earlier, and in August 2000 I started working in Newark. A couple of months later I moved up to Jersey City, and my year of transition ended.

It had been a shitty, confusing year for me. It started ten years ago today, and I’m glad it’s in the past.

But it’s still profound for me to realize that it’s been ten whole years since I said goodbye to Charlottesville. Writing this blog post is making me miss those years, that place, being young, 17 to 25. College and law school. Being on my own. Coming out. So much change, so much self-exploration, so much growth.

My life was at a dead end after college, and I’ve never known if law school — at UVa or elsewhere — was the right choice. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if, instead of going to law school in 1996, I’d continued working full-time at the UVa Music Library. Would I have wound up getting a library degree? Would I still have wound up going to law school eventually? Would my life have hit a dead end? Would I currently be working as a Barnes and Noble cashier?

Nostalgia can do weird things. My life is what it is. One could say that I’m still drifting. Maybe I would be drifting no matter what I chose.

August 4, 1999. May 21, 1995. August 21, 1991. Dates that are hinges.

Maybe we always drift and never stop until we die.