Interlude

This is absolutely my favorite part of my "night job":

Nassau79: lol
Nassau79: famous last idiot more like it
Nassau79: clown
Nassau79: where do they find these morons?
Nassau79: famous last jerkoff

I wonder what it would be like to get such honest feedback at my day job. Probably not quite as fun.

Adulthood?

I guess you could say this blog is a lost cause, but I do keep meaning to write something here. I just never sit down and do it, unfortunately. But I have had a lot on my mind lately, and I feel compelled to actually verbalize it before everything disappears into the ether.

When I was in school, and even for several years after graduating from college, I was always very conscious of feeling younger than my peers. I was one of the youngest in my class in school, based on whatever the arbitrary cutoff was when I started kindergarten. I think I had just one classmate in grade school who was younger than me. More importantly, though, I always felt immature mentally. Not in the typical sense you might think of for a school-age kid/teenager/young adult. I was never, ever irresponsible. In fact, I was painfully compliant to the “rules” and my parents’ wishes. I never went through any sort of teenage rebellion. Typical teenage “trouble areas” never even interested me. I didn’t like parties and I didn’t like drinking. I actually enjoyed studying, although I complained about it incessantly, because I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was a total nerd.

When I started college, I was 17. I was very homesick my first year, even though I was only 2 hours away from home and I went home almost every weekend. I felt totally lost, like a little kid being asked to live as an adult. Things got better as time went on, of course, and I did well at school and functioned well enough on my own. I still went home mostly every other weekend for the rest of my college career, though. And every other weekend when I went home, I took my laundry and let my mom do it for me. When I graduated, I was only too happy to come back home. Some of my friends were going off to live on their own in new cities with brand new jobs and some were staying around campus because it was just as much home to them now as their hometown had been. But it never crossed my mind to do anything other than pack up and move back home with my parents.

After I graduated from college, I went through a very bad depression. I’ve had a few periods of very bad, almost suicidal level depressions throughout my life, and this was one of the worst. I had always been a great student, dedicated to doing well in my classes. I think I got straight A’s in college. But I was unable to figure out what career I wanted to pursue, and so when I finished college, I had degrees in biology and psychology but no clue what I wanted to do with them. I told everyone who asked that my plan was to work for a few years to build some “real-world experience” and let that help me decide what to go to graduate school for. Grad school in biopsych or neuroscience? Maybe, but most psych programs were PhD level and I didn’t know if I wanted to commit to that, and I didn’t know if I’d be happy with life as a researcher. Law school? I loved logic and was detail oriented enough to probably do well, but I had terrible public speaking anxiety. Masters in Education? I love teaching in general but worried about how it would be to deal with dumb students and students who didn’t care to learn. And I thought it would get boring to teach the same stuff year after year. Veterinary school? At one point in college I was sure I would do this, but I worked at an animal hospital that I hated (bad coworkers, arrogant doctors) and changed my mind. Probably it was the wrong decision, but the experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth and doubts in my mind about the career.

So, anyway, being done with school and having my sense of identity suddenly gone (for my whole life it had been, “Julie, the student…” and now it was “Julie, _______”), I went through a terrible period of time. I worked part time at various jobs for a couple years, including my mom’s office, but mostly just drifted mentally and tried keep myself functional.

One of the problems I had at that time was the idea that I really wanted a vocation. My parents never pushed me to do anything I didn’t want to in life, but my mom always emphasized that I should find something that I loved for a career and then I would “never work a day in my life.” She was trying to be helpful. But this concept grew to carry enormous weight in my mind; it became something of an obsession – find the perfect career, the one that will keep me happy always. Of course, it didn’t happen. For years, I thought that eventually I would figure it out, and it would be like the key to the puzzle of my very existence and my whole life would fall into place. When I was in my early to mid twenties, this was the mantra of my life. But I never could figure it out.

Eventually, I fell into a job that I liked – definitely not one that I felt some overarching passion for – but something that I moderately enjoy. I became an office drone and found it’s really not that bad. When I started this job, I still had the sense that I would go back to school and find my “real career.” I work for a university, so I thought I would accrue my benefits for the requisite year and then be able to take classes for free at night. Great job benefit. I started leaning again towards a teaching career and getting a Masters in Education. But coincidentally, this was also the time I started doing very well with my after-work hobby -- playing poker.

To be continued…soon!