I realized today that I am a career whore.
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| Exhibit A |
Most of us twenty-something ladies are interested in finding
(or if you’ve already found then cultivating) “the one”. We buy elf-sized
dresses to stretch suggestively around our little rumps, and we spend hours
every Saturday showering, shaving two thirds of our bodies, and
straightening-to-then-curl, because we want to meet someone worthwhile.
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| Well said, Ryan |
We want to feel love the way it was marketed to us on Sex
and the City – like fireworks. Something beautiful that makes us insanely happy
and at times just a little nuts (like Carrie 85% of the time). It should be consuming, powerful, and transcendent. And we don’t want a dud either; we
want him to be smart, funny, panty-droppingly handsome (see right), and above all else, a
decent man who just can’t help but love us –backarm fat, half-wavy hair, bad
jokes and all.
And while we have our doubts sometimes, there is a reason we
watch rom-coms and cry drops of sorrow and hopeless joy (and a tinge of envy)
when that old couple coils together in a nursing-home bed and with clasped wrinkled hands, welcomes death (male readers pretending not to get this,
I’m referring to the end of The Notebook).
We believe it’s out there.
As with most motivated young individuals, we do not sit idly
by as our biological clock drops eggs like bombs over Baghdad. Instead, we take
matters into our own hands and spend our spare time at bars, nightclubs, and
social gatherings, secretly hunting. Not that we don’t enjoy ourselves or have
other priorities and--ahem, tons of friends--because of course we do! We're not fembots! (though the jury is still out on
those girls who manage to look wide-eyed, hydrated, and freshly blow-dried
after long plane rides—highly suspicious. You know the ones I mean, they never
seem to slouch either. How are they doing that?!) It is just that finding this
person is important to us in a way that is deep and fundamental.
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| Damn you fembots |
We are unapologetically dogmatic in our belief that we can find our fireworks man and that when he comes we’ll
somehow magically know and melt
into a happiness more freeing than a permanent overdose of E (or so I
hear…). Kind of like this puppy:
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| Found fireworks |
We tolerate our own recklessness and allow ourselves these
blunders because they are all an earnest (albeit often misguided) attempt to
find fireworks. And all other things considered (friends, family, good
job—check, check, check-ish), that is what we want for ourselves. Not (as men often paranoidly suspect) marriage, just magic.
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| Exhibit B (coworkers) |
But this is where I am unusual. I don’t know if it is
because I am a really old soul (trapped in a breathtaking young body), or if it
was because my parents’ marriage ended in utter catastrophe (love you mom!),
but I don’t do any of this. (I’m having myself tested).
Instead, I take this desperate-to-the-point-of-sluttiness ‘man-bition’ and put it towards my professional trajectory.
Instead, I take this desperate-to-the-point-of-sluttiness ‘man-bition’ and put it towards my professional trajectory.
That’s right, I spend my spare minutes obsessing over my
long-term career with the same annoying “where is this going” micromanagement
usually reserved for boyfriends/boyfriends-to-be. I think about “the future” in
anxious panicky ways, wondering if I will ever be “truly happy” with this path
I’m on. I exhaust myself expecting fireworks from my career the way most women
expect them from “the one”. And when it inevitably disappoints, I become as
surly as a forgotten girlfriend on Valentine’s Day.
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| Oh dear God |
For me, fireworks means being professionally challenged,
stimulated, and fulfilled. Not every moment of every day, of course, because I
understand that tediousness and disappointment are inevitable (in relationships
as well as at work), but I yearn to minimize them. After
all, this path that I am deciding upon right now is the thing that I will
probably spend most of my waking hours doing: 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week,
49 weeks a year, for the next 50 years. That’s 122,500 precious hours! Shouldn’t it be nothing short of fantastic?
Because of this self-imposed pressure, I flit between passions the same way socialites juggle I-bankers, wondering which path will
turn out to be the prince charming of careers. I obsesses over researching new fields, constantly revamping my resume to make myself more attractive to
yet another industry. I dread
picking a grad program and narrowing my scope, but am also anxious to enroll--before menopause! I live perpetually envious and terrified of specialization.
And just like the long and arduous search for love, all
these wrong turns and rejections prove exhausting and discouraging. Every so often I succumb to fear; I crouch down on the shower floor and with palms covering my face let hot tears
blend into the rivulets of water slipping off my chin, steaming up mirrors with
my angst at the overwhelming options, at the impossibility of ever finding that
one thing that I was born to do. My bliss. (#dramaqueen)
Of course I know even as I write this, that the idea of
finding “the perfect job” is just as laughable –if not more so—than finding the
perfect guy. You can’t expect any one thing to make you feel whole or satiated.
It is like trying to get all your nutrition from one food.
And I also recognize that my behavior is just as naïve,
impractical, and ultimately self-destructive as those women who plunge blindly into relationships, expecting too much too soon and setting
themselves up to be under-whelmed. But somehow, just like them, I justify my
behavior because my intentions are honest ones (misguided maybe,
but honest). Besides, what else would you have me do? Nothing?
I’m beginning to think nothing might be better. Life is
funny (and not always in the ha-ha sense). Most of the time this “magic” we are
tearing our lives apart looking for seems to happen when our backs are turned.
Whether you’re searching for love, career, or both, perhaps our deepest desires
are less like a high-hanging fruit and more like a watched pot—all we can do is
fill it with water, light the stove, and practice patience. If we do these
things, eventually, it has to boil. It just has to.
One of my favorite college professors (gray
ear hair, platypus lips) liked to use the metaphor of a door closing into a
lock to explain the way things at the end of a poem slide into place. Sometimes the door
seems closed but it isn’t in the latch; you must listen intently for that subtle click. It takes great skill to hear and
to heed.
I think this applies to life too. However, while we are
right to be listening for the click, should we really be hunting it? When listening too closely, everything grows louder – a
slight buzzing from the television, the whir of ceiling fan, the tick of an
oven, someone’s boots on the pavement below. If you're too focused, these small
noise pollutions drown out everything else. And what’s worse—you grow antsy, are
more easily frustrated by failure and more prone to false alarms.
Furthermore, with the bleak job market and the rapid decline
in religious zeal over the past few generations (church
attendance dropped roughly 9% or ~28.3 million Americans in the past 30 years, while unemployment increased a whopping 2.6% or 8.2 million in about the same time frame), I suspect we’ve collectively lost our trust in this
idea that things work themselves out. At least, I have. Until very recently (two hours ago),
I believed “destiny” was something stoners invented as an excuse to pack
one more weekday bowl and order another Meat Lover’s Supreme.
But perhaps, when used correctly, this idea is not entirely
naiveté and baseless. Maybe we need to recover just a little bit of trust in
life’s mysterious workings (I’m picturing Adam Smith’s invisible hand v2.0–for
lovers and young professionals).
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| Bringing sexy back |
Maybe—just maybe—we are so anxiously, "proactively" moving from lover to
lover and job to job, that we are disrupting a kind of natural progression.
Ever wonder why you’re either hopelessly begrudgingly single--home eating Entemen’s by the carton with an outbox spate with rejected sexts,-- OR you are
trying to decide between a Friday night with three equally viable hunks and your current boyfriend?
I suspect it has to do with
some vague primordial energy (of the sort that hippies “cleanse”) and is proof that, apart from the LSATs, the bedroom, and the sports field,
over-exertion gets us nowhere. Maybe our overeager seizure of our destiny is
our own worst enemy. Maybe we don't need tighter butts or more obscure fellowships; maybe we just need to employ a little quiet faith.
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| Ah, the single life |
Then again, maybe not. I don’t really know. I’m a silly 25
year old with a fantastic imagination and perfectly shaped eyebrows. I have
no credentials or authority (despite what my 37 CVCs may claim). But right now this life-patience sounds like an
appealing, less painful, more effective alternative to the ruthless career crusade I’ve been
waging on myself (and a good way to prevent premature aging).
A few weeks ago I came across this quote by Brazilian author
Paolo Coelho that continued to revisit me: “everything will be all right in the
end; if it is not all right it is not the end”. I sincerely hope so. But how do
I stop myself from doubting? And how does one, after all these years, learn to trust inaction?
Of that I'm not sure, but my good friends Bear, Bodie, and Piper are already proving to be great teachers:
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| Bear |
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| Bodie |
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| Piper |
Is there any limit to what we can learn from Brazilians and puppies?
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