Fuck /bant/ I'm scared out of my wits and I need your help.

Let me be perfectly blunt here. I am going to ask you a question at the end of all of this. It is a difficult question to answer, but I wouldn’t be asking you all this if it was something that I could easily answer myself. I need you to answer me. I honestly don’t know what to do. Before I get ahead of myself, let me give you the whole story.

After college, I moved away from home. I moved over twenty hours away to another state, over a thousand miles away from my closest family member. I didn’t do this because my relationship with my family was in any way strained. It was quite the opposite actually. They have been nothing, but supportive and caring of my decisions and choices. I think the reasons behind my decision for the change in scenery were because I really wanted to feel independent. I’m not proud to admit it, but living so close to my family, I felt coddled. I wanted to accomplish something that I felt wasn’t handed to me on a silver platter. It was with that foolish thought that I packed up all my things and left.

The first few years went by without much problem. I found a nice cheap apartment and a well-paying job. I kept in contact with my family and settled into my life. It wasn’t until the milestones in their lives started rolling around that I began to feel isolated. My brother graduated from college and I couldn’t attend because I was working. My mother and father celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and I wasn’t able to congratulate them at a celebratory dinner because I was thousands of miles away. I think the real final straw that proved too much for the camel’s back was my sister’s pregnancy and the birth of my nephew.