misgivings

My response to an email.

First of all, I LOVE LOVE LOVE that you do your morning writing.  I wrote nearly every day from about eighth grade through sophomore year of college, and I know for a fact that it was a major factor in keeping (most of) my sanity.  There's something so liberating and simultaneously clarifying about bleeding it all out on paper, and it got me through some really dark times.  I wish I were still doing it, but I basically stopped after I got mugged and the scoundrels took my journal, with 300 some completed pages.  I went back and looked for it in dumpsters and trash cans the next day, but no dice.  So, everything else that was stolen from me was replaceable, but what they really got was my most healthy habit.  I know, I know, I could totally start doing it again, but I'd be working against inertia.

Secondly, I agree it's not a sad email.  It's a "soul"-searching email (the word soul is a loaded word, hopefully enveloping it in quotation marks makes it less so).  Who was it who said that the unexamined life is not worth living?

I don't think I'm the person to come to for advice on purpose or direction.  I have spent my entire life coasting along, falling into opportunity once in a while, but generally failing to fulfill my potential.  I don't have the intrinsic motivation to go into business for myself, or even to get an independent project off the ground of my own volition.  I quit my job mostly because my boss was a psycho hose beast, true, but I also had a role in making it a dead end before my former boss was promoted.  If I'd framed myself as a go-getter then, I'd never have ended up pigeon-holed, but I don't appear to have the faith in myself necessary to make a commitment and go full-bore on anything.  It's too bad, too, because I had a really lucrative and smart research proposal that fizzled out because of it, and it would've been a skill I could parlay into other areas.


I don't know what your direction should be, but I can tell you that I've been waiting for mine to become clear to me since...well, forever.  My college major was a default choice.  My job for the last seven years was sort of accidental.  This nursing school thing is self-driven, I think, because I've always been interested in medicine but not hard-core enough to commit to medical school, but recently I'm not convinced nursing is what I want to do, either.  I'm desperately envious of the people who knew their calling from the start, and pursued it, and love their jobs.  I've never even had a job I liked very much.  And my conclusion is that since I don't have a singular passion, but rather a number of interests (which are passing or perseverant), maybe I'm not destined for any particular career.  Maybe it's okay not to commit to anything, but to transition every few years.  And maybe I won't even have a passionate career, in which case I find something that isn't horrible and allow myself to work as a means to an end, the end being to have a comfortable life, to be able to save money for the things I want, and to be able to take the time off work to enjoy them.  It's not going to advance me through the corporate ladder, but I'm just not that driven by work.  I'm good at organizing explicit tasks, setting deadlines, and meeting them, but not very good at dreaming up the projects in the first place.  Clearly, that's why I do poorly in art classes...except pottery, for some reason.

I can tell you that I believe everyone needs to live away from the place they grew up for a while, because it takes being removed from it to evaluate it objectively.  I know you were out of the country for some time, but that might have been a little too far away to seem real?  Have you thought about living elsewhere in the States? 

Have you ever picked up one of those "what should I do with my life?" books, or the vocational surveys they offer?  I think they're abject bullshit.  I score equally highly in so many areas that they never point me in a definitive direction.  Moreover, questions like, "Would you rather assemble a table from written instructions, or figure out how much everyone owes for a restaurant meal?" never provide a response like, "well, I like building Ikea tables about once a year, but I'd shoot myself if I had to do it every day."  I think it's fairly clear that I should drop out of school, start a hippie commune, and begin popping out babies.  I have certainly been neglecting my biological imperative, and looking after a pack of offspring and teaching them to hoe corn ought to leave little time for restless introspection.  Fuck, I should start blogging again, at least.  OMG, that's the perfect plot.  I will reinstate my neglected blog, perhaps with the text of this very message, and my readership will grow until I'm the new dooce.com and I can just live off the proceeds of my brilliant restless introspection.  YES!  (Only problem is, I've always sucked at making friends, so the readership ranks will likely never swell to such illustrious numbers to support my lazy housewifery.)

I guess that my overall response is -- you're not tapping into your purpose?  Well, that makes me feel a little better, because I'm fucking certain I'm not, either.  And I've had similar conversations with at least two other mutual friends of ours, so I guess we're in good company.  GenX is supposed to be angsty and entitled, right?  Although I recently read that we're not actually GenX or GenY, but some orphaned middle group.  GenX 2.0, maybe.  In buggy beta.  Look, I made a techy joke!  I'm fucking 7eet!  (Did I say that right?)

I miss you, too.  And I miss when it seemed like we were so on track, and that we deserved to go out on the weekends and get blitzed.  In fact, that's what we were expected to do, so really we'd have been letting someone down if we didn't.  I rarely have that much fun anymore.

<3,
~ snatch