Further examination

From my high school graduation until about 4 years ago, I was waiting for a thunderbolt. For whatever reasons (20something entitlement, general arrogance) I thought my future would be handed to me on a plate. I had talent and smarts. I assumed that I just had to hang around, sing in my car with my windows down, and that I was pretty much guaranteed to be discovered and score, at the very least, a moderately lucrative gig singing advertisement jingles. My belief in fate had made me complacent. So, while I was hanging around waiting to become 1 in 10 million, I just worked, partied, and slept in late. I genuinely assumed my reward was eminent.

At that time, since I wasn’t going to school or doing anything redeeming with my life, I drank a lot of Vodka and watched a lot of TV, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I had been suffering some occupational malaise, and I felt like I needed a new direction (or just a direction). I was beginning to realize that rockstar probably wasn’t going to happen. I had a dream one night, and Giles from BtVS was in it. Eureka! I knew the very next morning that I wanted to be a librarian. So, I was 25, had one semester of college (and was still technically on academic probation) and knew nothing about how to be a librarian. I didn’t know what type of schooling that was involved or the amount of work it would be. I thought you just sent in box tops or something. So, I went about everything the wrong way, again, and kept waiting for the miracle. Basically, I traded one nowhere job for another, except for less money and fewer benefits. There was, for my first 6 months at the library, no progress. I was still idle and at the mercy of my destiny.

It was somewhere in this mess that I started to realize that there would be work, a lot of it. There would be choices and challenges and uncomfortable situations to get where I needed to be. I wasn’t going to just become a librarian anymore than I was going to just become a unicorn. This is where I started to evolve from meta-physical to positivistic in my thinking. For the first time, I realized that I had to put something out there if I expected something back. It is a simple idea, but one that I failed to grasp for the first 25 years of my existence. I enrolled in school and actually had a plan.

And that was it. I got a new job, completed my associate’s degree and started my bachelor’s. I have plans for graduate school and a path for my life. Not to be cliché, but I am the mistress of my own destiny.

As a teenager, 13 or 14, I read the word fatalistic and associated it, incorrectly, with fatal/fatality. I thought fatalistic meant preoccupied with death. Later, I learned the correct meaning of the word, but looking back at how much of my life I gave to my rampant fatalism, I’m not sure my original definition was that far off. Now, I am regressing to the meta-physical but in a smarter way. I want to return a little bit of my free will, but not all of it. I want to be smart and savvy but also hopeful. I also want to feel like my movements in the universe do matter. That there is something to the idea of human connectedness. I really like the liberty mutual “good deed” commercials for exactly that reason. I like knowing that a small gesture can change the world.