something i would check into: if you join the peace corps, do they get your education loans forgiven?

if the answer is yes, how does that make you feel?

there's many different ways to be a lawyer. you don't have to do it the way your dad did it. (and btw, can't he help you out with those loans?)

It doesn't matter "where this is going" (!) What matters is that you find it fulfilling. Playing music is not about becoming the next Segovia or Parkening. It's about self-expression, it's about taking the condition of your heart and putting it into sound vibration and letting it resonate with you. This is a profound and healing process. It feeds you.

I agree with the others that you need to make even just 15 minutes a day your sacred time to strum. Keep taking lessons. Don't worry about your "progress." It's about just being with the instrument and the sound it makes.

For encouragement, I recommend you read "Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey" by Perri Knize. She was also at midlife when she developed an inexplicable passion for the sound of the piano and had to pursue it. The book is about her quest to understand the true nature of her obsession, and it will no doubt help you to better understand yours, inspire you, and support you in your need for the guitar.

Follow what calls to you. It will take you to some most surprising places.

the daughter does not have a key to HER OWN HOUSE?! what kind of parent locks her child out of her own home?

the LW wants to emancipate a 16 year old??

i think the neighbors are right!

i'm now in my 50s, and believe it or not, my parents are still holding grudges about the perfectly normal teenage things i did when i was a teenager. 40 years later!

cary's advice is dead on. and these people sound like they are going to wind up just like my parents--without a relationship with their adult daughter or future grandchildren.

an eye-opening documentary for me when i was around the LW's age was a film called "28 up." the british filmmakers decided to follow a bunch of school children as they grew up, investigating the idea of "show me a child at 7 and i'll show you the man."

the premise was that whoever we are at seven is our real selves, and in between the ages of 7 and 28, we lose that self for a time. we forget who we are, but with maturity, we reawaken to ourselves.

so we got to meet these kids at seven, then again at 14, then again at 21, and finally at age 28. every seven years, they were interviewed on film.

the results did prove the maxim. the seven year old who proclaimed he wanted to be an african missionary was in fact an african missionary at age 28. but we also got to see how in between he'd forgotten that and lost his way for a time.

not all of their stories ended well, but it was so abundantly clear to the audience that our innate selves are who we are so indestructibly, that we needn't have worried about losing them. our true natures do win out, in the end.

i believe the task before you now is to try to remember back to your earliest dreams, or the last dream you can claim that was really your own--not the dreams prescribed for you by parents, peers, school, and society--but your own private dream.

and then investigate that. see where it leads you.

trust yourself. trust the process of life. allow what comes to you in your inner vision to be a thread you follow without knowing where it is taking you, for a while. you're on a familiar journey, even if it seems strange to you!

how does the saying go? "if you love someone, let them go, and if they come back, they are yours. and if they don't, they never really were yours in the first place."

getting married because of your shelf life is a really, really bad reason to get married, and the fact that you see this as a driving imperative says volumes about how little you understand about marriage.

meanwhile, it sounds as if you have so much going for you, lw! why would you throw it all over for someone who isn't all that into you?

there's millions of people out there in the world. many of them could rock your world, not just one. not just ten!

tell lover-boy his terms are a deal-breaker, and then set about making your life as wonderful and powerful as you can make it, without him.

when you are fully yourself, own yourself, command your own life, then the most wonderful people do appear, and you will find someone who values you so much they would never ever dream of risking losing you by suggesting you both date other people.

feh. kick this guy to the curb.