1) in my early twenties, struggling between doing what I love and doing what is necessary to pay the bills
-and-
2) desperately missing the thrill I used to feel when putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as I suppose is most appropriate here.)
I expect that this blog will be filled with a sprinkling of reviews, a dash of things-that-inspire-me, a sprig of health and fitness, a pinch of journaling and a whole heaping dose of personal musings. This blog is a lot like myself - full of lots of concepts and ideas, but not really able to put a definite finger on any simple categorical definition.
 |
| Unless that definition is simply "Odd" |
As of this posting, I am just barely 24 years old. I have a part time job as a Standardized Test Evaluator (and great googly moogly I wish I could post about some of the wacky shit these kids come up with... darn confidentiality) and am trying to make a livable wage off of freelance graphic design and illustration. I'm a fairly healthy adult, but not slim enough to keep the occasional jerk from feeling free to shout insults about my weight at me (yay, maturity!).
I used to do a lot of creative writing when I was younger - had a whole series of books going with a list of people at school who'd line up to read them. Then, one day, I simply couldn't continue. I told myself at the time that it was stress mixed in with a healthy dose of teenage depression that squashed my creativity like a blind worm trying to cross a highway, but in retrospect have come to realize that I was also running out of ideas. While the books were a great achievement for my age, they weren't the most inspiring pieces of literature and there's only so far that I could stretch the concepts I was working with before I began to feel dissatisfied with the quality of my work.
Not that completely halting my writing for the better part of 5 years was satisfying either. Guess my subconscious didn't really think ahead in that respect.
I recently graduated college with a BA in Psychology. It's a field that fascinates me, but I keep wavering about whether or not it was a good choice. On the one hand, it's a good general degree that I can apply to a number of fields as far as careers go. On the other hand, it's a field that I can't really get work in unless I go to grad school. Not only am I not in the right financial place in my life to afford grad school without loans that I can't afford or asking more from my parents than I am comfortable with, but frankly I got very burned out in college. The last few months of my senior year were a mess - my grades were good, but I had a horrible time trying to balance the stress of paying bills, going to work, going to class, going through an emergency surgery, struggling with my landlords, and supporting my fiance as he desperately searched for work in this terrible economy. Once I graduated, I was done with school for a while.
The funny thing is, while I don't want to go back to school at this point in my life, I do miss the structure that it gave me. I was always a high achiever in school - academics came easily to me (ignoring the higher-level math courses) and I think a good amount of my self esteem depended upon school as the ruler to judge my value against. Without that... it's gotten a little harder to feel like a good productive person. Looking for work at a time when jobs are hard to come by has made it harder to feel positive about the things I am doing with my life.
But rather than wander down the road of existential crisis, let's end this post here. I hope I can post things that are useful, entertaining and possibly inspirational. Assuming I do so, then maybe even one day I can get an actual audience to speak to. It's an odd feeling to speak to everyone and no one at the same time as I post this, knowing that the chances of anyone reading it may be slim.
Be good, be happy, and try not to freak out all the time.
Jez
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