There's a degree of arbitrariness to life.  Sometimes there's not a right answer or a wrong answer... you just pick one and see what happens.  That is how I have been operating since I first had the opportunity to make decisions.  Moving to Seattle straight out of high school was the path of least resistance.  I went to art school because I had a creative itch and it was a good way to avoid worrying about my GPA during my senior year.  I took the first job I found, at a video store, and by the time I was 21 I had an Associates of Arts degree and an aptitude for alphabetization.

I took the jobs that were offered to me.  I slept with the men who liked me.  It took me a long time to realize that I was not taking any agency in my own life.  I didn't want to.  I just wanted someone else to tell me what to do.  I wanted to fulfill the desires of others because I had no idea what my own desires were.  If I tried to discover my own needs and wants a great void of fear opened before me.  To take responsibility for forming my own life felt like too great a burden, so I took what was there.

Mortality can be a reminder that time is short.  When my mom got Leukemia in 1998 I was working in a depressing basement doing bookkeeping and hating myself.  Without any safety net at all, I decided to quit.  I did temp work for a while, got married, and then fell into the job that would bring me to where I am now.

Between 1999 and 2004 I started my own business, went back to college, went to Europe, got divorced, and watched my mom be cured of cancer and my dad die of cancer.  I worked as an "agency coordinator" for a small interactive agency before I was laid off in 2001, and then in 2002 I got a call from one of the VPs, asking if I'd be interested in doing his books.  I wasn't, really.  I hate bookkeeping, but I have a knack for it and ultimately I ended up managing projects more than counting beans.

And so, at the end of 2007 I had earned my Bachelor's degree from the University of Washington and climbed up to the Senior Project Manager position with a decent salary and bonus.  I was completely burned out, and it was an act of kindness when I was let go last month.

So what now?  I'm taking the down time as an opportunity to go to the gym a lot, but ultimately I need to decide what is next.  I can get work doing what I've been doing, but once again that is just taking what is in front of me because any major change is too scary, and possibly not feasible financially.  There are certain realities I can't escape.  But, if I have the opportunity to discover work that I really love I don't want to bypass it in favor of security.

I need to make money.  I would rather do something more tangible than project management (which is really just chaos control).  Writing is high on the list, but it will take some time to establish myself as a freelance writer, and I need to eat.  I've considered taking an Editing certificate program, or Technical Writing, or Web design... skills that I can use anywhere.  But which one? And how to choose? And how to pay for it?

Of course there's always academia.  There's something strangely appealing about throwing myself into some esoteric branch of literature and becoming a professor.  There's also something incredibly unappealing about becoming part of an institution with all of the politics and bureaucracy. And the student loan to salary ratio is not promising.

There's no reason to stay in Seattle, but there's no reason to go anywhere else either.  I don't want to just sit here waffling, but there does not seem to be any decisive moment looming.  I'm going to have to comb through the options.  I wish it did not feel so tedious.  I wish there was a real fire of excitement somewhere, but in truth simply realizing that I have options and preferences is progress from where I was 10 years ago.

Originally posted on kgi.vox.com