Tag Archives: 20-something problems

What about writing?

4 Feb
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This Dog loves me

This is a conversation I’ve had in a variety of ways and shapes over the last couple of months with a number of friends and family.

I was at a friend’s birthday party and another friend was telling me about a hip-hop karaoke event that he’d attended and asked me why I wasn’t there as karaoke is one of my most beloved past times.

“I just got my biology text book in the mail, so I’ve been all study, all the time,” I told him.
“Oh, so this is for vet school.”
“Well, no, it’s for vet tech school. I don’t think vet school was ever for me. I’m thinking maybe going into animal behavior or zoology one day.”
A concerned look sweeps across his face.
“But what about writing?”

Well, what about writing? I ask myself that question every day. I have Mondays off of work, so I spent my entire day poring over a Biology text book. I occasionally took breaks to cook, take a walk, read, and write. I also took some time to research possible careers in animal behavior and/or zoology. It’s all interesting. I know I could do it. But it all feels like such a farce. Like who am I kidding with this shit? I feel like a square peg, shoving myself into a round hole and hoping no one notices that my edges don’t quite match up.

I’m quite ashamed of my job history. It’s something I joke about, because it is funny. But in a greater sense, it shows how little commitment I have. It’s not just the job history, it’s the things I’ve pursued. Three years ago, I thought I was going to go back to school to be a teacher. I studied an LSAT book for a couple of weeks. I took a graphic designing class. I bought an introduction to linguistics book. Nothing fits.

While I know that a lot of people my age are at a loss as to what they want to do, I don’t want to be among them. My friend who had the birthday on Saturday is my age, and she has a successful career, a stunning apartment, a graduate degree. I suppose I thought things would fall into place for me by now.

But what about writing? It’s all I’ve really wanted to do. I just don’t know how to swallow my pride, my fear and do it. I simply don’t know how.

 

 

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The Balance

9 Nov

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been feeling down lately. It’s a multitude of things, but mainly it’s the omnipresent 20-something oh-my-God-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life blues. It’s not knowing if I want to stay in New York, but also not knowing where I want to go. It’s daydreaming at work of flying to Paris, living in Montmarte, and taking real good care of a box of window flowers. It’s all nonsense, but it still gets me down.

The problem is when I’m feeling down, I feel so low to the ground, there’s no farther down to go. I’ve always thrown my full weight into sadness. I always think of a stanza from “Elegy for Jane,” one of my favorite Theodore Roethke poems,

“Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.”

That’s exactly how I feel when I’m down. To get into English major nerdery, Jane takes the action of casting herself down. She does it to herself. Yet that adjective “clearest” indicates that there’s nothing mentally wrong with her. It almost seems contemplative.

Anyways, when I’m down, I like to read blogs about how to be happy, how to cheer yourself up, how to become one of those shiny women who seem to have it together. I study Buddhism. I try so hard to find ways to be more complacent, to be at peace, to wake up every morning smiling, and return to bed at night satisfied. But don’t we all strive for happiness in one way or another? Aren’t we all in one way or another trying to become happier? I’m just more type A and obsessed with it.

Then I came across this amazing post about how to survive a personal apocalypse. I was already well aware of the whole “This too shall pass” mantra. The thing where you tell yourself that struggles will eventually subside and that happiness will happen again. But what struck me is how she mentioned that sadness will come again too. That when you’re happy, you have to accept that one day, you won’t be. It sounds so pessimistic, but to me it’s peaceful.

There’s no way to be happy all the time, and it’s not healthy to strive for that. It’s all part of the balance. It’s why I love rain so much. Rainy days have their own feel, and their own sense of quiet life. When the rain clears, and it’s sunny again, we all appreciate it more, we all feel more thankful. But without the rain, the sunny days get mundane. I’ve lived in Nevada, and I’ve experienced that phenomenon first hand. So the sad days are like that as well. They make the happy days brighter.

So in sadness, I often think how it will be over, and I will be happy soon enough. But I think in happy days, I should live with knowing that I will one day be sad, angry, frustrated. It’s all okay. It seems so simple, but it struck me as something truly important to know.

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