And this is it

It's 2:26 am.
I've just finished one of the least urgent things I had to do to prepare for my next ten days of exams, but at least I did something; I seem to be afflicted with an inability to work, and yet work I must if I don't want to fail.
And I don't want to fail.
I'm leaving.
Three years here have done me in. I am sick of my studies, I am sick of French humanities universities and the strikes year in, year out, sick of the small permanent mass of communist throwbacks dreaming of 1968. I am tired of worrying about whether I'll get through a whole semester or not this time, tired of worrying whether we'll get thrown out of class each time they hold a meeting-this happened twice already and now the whole uni is shut down.
So, I'm off; I am graduating, and I am moving to Taiwan to get my chinese up to scratch.

I'm scared. But I'm anticipatng it like crazy.
Financially, things should be ok if I make enough this summer to pay for my university tuition over there. Socially, half my class is moving to Taiwan, which is quite entertaining :) I'm exaggerating, but my darling F will be there for five months, O is coming with me as an independent student, and Vic and C have scholarships with uni.

I finally talked it over with JJ today; he's happy for me, but he clearly told me we were through when I left. I felt so lonely.
I was expecting it; JJ's a chronic paranoid, he'd go crazy with me on the other side of the world; in his perspective we'll be better off split up, which makes me sad. I wasn't sure, but I would have been willing to give it a go, if he'd had some faith. But instead...well, I guess we'll see, the girls coming back don't have many flattering things to say about Taiwanese men^^
I tried telling JJ I wasn't going there for men, but he just can't deal with that kind of stuff. I find it amazing. But apparently he's still in shock we made it past the one-month mark, and that i actually fell in love with him.

I had a conversation with my mother that shook me to the core today, about this same subject. I told her JJ hadn't taken it too well, and she laughingly said "you're so cruel to your boyfriends".
We were talking about him telling me we were over the moment I left France, and she was all "well you can't love him that much if you're leaving".
I swear to God, I nearly had a heart attack.

My mother routinely tells me I don't care much about my boyfriends. She happens to be right pretty often. It's not that i don't care at all, it's just...I can't get sentimental, and over-the-top, all the movie stuff girls are supposed to do and like, all that crap, you know? Well I don't mind watching it, but any guy who expects me to act like that is basically screwed. I'm hopelessly pragmatic, very take it or leave it, I'll never go on loving someone who's left me, it's not part of my DNA somehow, I don't know. I could never be the heroine of some dramatic love story; I'm incapable of that kind of feeling. Which I find worrying, sometimes. I wonder if my incapacity to sustain a relationship winds from there. And then i tell myself that I'm twenty, so fuck that.

I told her I wasn't the one who wanted to stop when I left, but that there was no way I was going to put my life on hold for any man. No way, period. I don't think he'd want me to, either. He'd be happy if I stayed, but there's nothing for me here at the moment. I need a year out. So yeah, scratch the plans that make me excited as hell, that are part of my career plan, because my relationship will be over? I don't think so. I told her as much, saying that if I had to forsake my life's plan because of love, it was a very crappy love indeed, and i didn't agree. If someone can't love me like that, and support my choices, well then yeah, it'll be over. And yeah, I'll cry about it, because I love JJ. it's going to be bloody painful, come to think of it. Prince Charming says I should dump him before he can, but that's really shooting myself in the foot. Pain now, less later? Possibly, but I'd rather not.

I don't know, it felt so...strange, the implication that it was my fault, coming from my mother. I unfortunately immediately flared up, going "so what, i should stay because some guy will leave me?". She backed down, saying "no, it's just a bit extreme, other people could think differently"
Well, obviously. But this is what I think. I'm allowed to think it's better; I'm not forcing anyone to do the same, or giving long lectures about how it's the right way to go. There's no right way. I might personally think that giving up what you want to do for the person you love is a dumb thing to do, that doesn't mean I think that the people who do this are dumb. Different choices suit different people.

It just felt so goddamn weird. I'd never felt this kind of undercover attack on my ideas from my mother. I bet people will say I'm overreacting, but this is me, and this is my mother, and there's never been the slightest hint of anything like this before.
Which is probably why I'm so damn assertive on the subject. And will be single in approximatively four months and a half. Yay me.