At 22 it's hard to figure out if you are in the right place.
In fact, i'd say it's still the age where you could make a place right for you.
The problem is that you do a have numerous choices here: you could stay in texas and make that your new home, you could move back up north, or you could do many other things like move to another country and give life a try there.
The downside is that you will probably regret not choosing one of the other options down the line. I don't say this to make you feel bad at all, but there simply are some benefits with each options that you forego if you take another.
I'd just go for gut feeling here, do what feels best to you.
In 10 years you might realize that taking one of the other options would have been better having 20/20 hindsight, but there simply is no way to predict which option would turn out best based on what you know now.
Don't worry about regrets: do what feels best on what you know right now. Even if this turns out not to be the best, at the very least you can say 'i made the best choice on what i knew back then'.
Many people feel regret over things they could not possibly have overseen. You could state that you would have avoided a traffic accident if you left 5 minutes earlier or later, or have taken a different route that usually took longer. While it is absolutely true that you could have avoided a tragedy by any of those things, it is also true you had no information to base your decision on. And if you don't get into an accident, who is to say that you would not have gotten into one had you left a bit earlier, later, or took a different route.
Don't worry about future regret: it will be there regardless of what you choose now, just with different motivations.
Best advice in the thread IMO... emphasis mine. I have a few thoughts, that I'll add below.
From the reddit thread, it sounds like there are four things you're taking into account in your decision: getting a solid degree, getting away from your parents, the possibility of having a pet, and your new girlfriend. Honestly, disregard the pet issue... that's super short term, and you'll make it. We'll lump that in with 'getting away from your parents.'
I feel like I can partially speak to the issue of your girlfriend. I recently took a job in Colorado - 1,500 miles from my girlfriend of 4 years in Virginia. It'll be tough for a couple years. But here's the thing: we both understood that the relationship had to take a back seat in the short term so that I could do what's best for my career and, by proxy, us. We had to sit down and carefully weigh our options to make the decision that was best for us as a couple. With a super new relationship, that's not really a conversation that can be had (and if it is had, it'll be clouded by the issue of love versus infatuation). It sucks to be far away, but I don't think the location of your girlfriend should factor significantly. If you can get a comparable degree without ditching your family in favor of a girlfriend of several months, don't ditch your family.
I absolutely understand wanting to get away from your parents, though I don't know if going back to New York is necessarily the right way to approach it.
You mention you aren't happy in Texas. In New York, you had a support structure of friends, family, activities, etc. In Texas you don't - and because of it, you're not happy. But it also seems you haven't tried very hard to rebuild that where you live now.
Do you
want to be happy in Texas? If the answer is yes, you've got to try harder to rebuild your life. If the answer is no, then you need to do some soul searching to figure out why that is.
If you want some sort of compromise, to get out from under your parents but still get a good degree, why not look into Texas A&M? Last I checked, they had a good environmental science program and it's far enough away from Houston that you'd need to move there.
...this is probably not the advice you wanted to hear, but there it is.
Hope things look up for you.
Trevor
