Without that path

It's been over a year since I graduated college and I am not really any closer to figuring out what I would like to do with my life. During the months before graduation, I sought the help of everyone I could think of: both of my academic advisors, the career help center, and - perhaps the most unusual - the gifts discernment coordinator. (Though, honestly, I have always thought of him more as a Quaker seer.) F. was kind of a controversial figure in some circles, but I was desperate. I needed all the help I could get trying to decide what my next steps would be. I had applied to two graduate programs and got rejected from both: academia was all I knew and all I was good at and without that path I was lost.

I went to F. twice in the month or so before graduation. I told him the dreams my subconscious was giving me, that I wanted to live in a place that had flowing water (remembering Venice, my true love in the form of a city), that I was thinking about DC. In return, he told me I was stronger than I thought, asked me what wine and water symbolized for me, and told me - though not in so many words - that I did not belong in DC. Those two meetings come back to me a lot. I moved to DC anyway, obviously, but it's true: this city isn't really mine. I like being here, I appreciate having public transportation and museums, but I don't quite belong.



I don't have the ambition, the drive, that it takes to really thrive here. Like I said in my first post here, I'm something of a dilettante. But honestly, it's less this city and more that I am just not cut out for office work. This feeling of not-belonging has been building and building - which is not quite the right attitude to have before a job interview. (Yes, I had one, yesterday.) It seems to me that what I want to do right now is hole up somewhere and write, maybe making money by working in a bookstore or a café or hell, maybe a bakery or something. Way opens, as the Quakers at school used to say.

At any rate, I've made some lists:

what I don't want

• an office
• to be in charge of people
• sitting all day
• something morally/ethically reprehensible
• in VA

what I do want

• reading
• writing
• to be happy