My goddamn future

I used to have such a tunnel vision of my life. It was all so obvious and so set; overachieve in college, work as many hours as possible at a job, overachieve in law school or public policy at Harvard while working as many hours as possible, overachieve at getting a career and work maybe two jobs (one isn’t enough once school ends). Buy a house. Get married. Have baby-creatures. Have a nervous breakdown at thirty, hopefully overachieve at that to get it all out of my system, then get back on track for working myself to death.

So, that’s all over now, which is happy times. But decision-making is a much foggier process these days, now that everything is so free-floating. I used to consider making the decision not to do something because it seemed like too much work for too little payoff to be really weak and whiny. Some little part of me still pipes up to guilt me, but I find myself way too incapable these days of pretending something I hate is something good for me.

For example, school. The plan was, get back to school. Grad school for social work. Eventually. I knew it was what I wanted to do, but couldn’t answer anybody as to when I wanted to do it. And that was okay. I was taking time off, relaxing. I figured, like most big things in life, a time and a place and a circumstance would come that would create an opportunity for me to think, going back to school now would be a good idea.

Lately, my job has become intolerable. Every day I think about quitting. I don’t feel like it’s a serious threat, like any day might be the day I quit. But I feel this as a very definite future, that if things don’t change I won’t last here. I don’t know how long, but I know I am now disengaged and unhappy where I used to be loyal and excited. This has gone from a place I want to be to a place I happen to be, until I figure out something better.

Something better seemed like it would be school, so I started that process, but now I’m not so sure. There’s logistical problems — the application deadline is coming up, and I need to get transcripts from a school that has messed up my records abominably, and a recommendation letter from a professor who probably doesn’t remember me, and I need to do that in two months, and I’d like to see bureaucracy and academics get anything done on a two-month deadline. I need to write a personal statement that makes me want to retch, and a fake “policy paper” that proves I am a monkey with a library card. And all this for the privilege of getting more in debt during a goddamn Depression, without being certain I can get loans these days, and certainly without wanting loans, so I can sit in elementary-level classes with groups of wide-eyed people who need to be gently prodded into the belief that racism, sexism, classism, and ageism are alive and well and relevant. And then, after that, I can get a slightly higher-paying job and be forced to stay in it for a lifetime because I am terrified of defaulting on my ever-larger student loans. And, let’s not forget, be forced to stay living in wherever I am because getting a new job is a horrible thought in this day and age.

Sounds like a big fucking racket to me. Which does not sound like the “me” of yesteryear, who so happily and fervently plowed my way through college, through two majors and two minors, because I really thought it would make a difference. Now, I am in this job I do not care for any longer, doing work that does not fulfill me, and have destroyed any other options of financial solvency precisely because I attended college. I can’t go get a job I can be less attentive to, because I need to pay my loans; the only way to possibly better my situation would be to enter some program that would stop my student loans (like more schooling), which would require more student loans, so I can be stuck in a slightly better job I am not fulfilled by.

It occurred to me yesterday that I am using school as an all-purpose solution. Get out of or less involved with my job, get my student loans deferred, and get the chance to apply to other jobs doing more or less the same work for the same pay, only I won’t have to answer the phones. That meets all my goals, eventually, with a lot of debt and unhappiness trailing behind me. But making myself miserable to meet my goals is no longer an acceptable strategy for me, so I don’t know if this is the thing.

What I want is to work. School is a means to get the kind of jobs I want, because I want to work with fucked-up people in fucked-up places, but you don’t get to hang with those folk unless you’ve got 30k around your neck. But maybe I can find a different route. I tried to think last night just where I want to be, what kind of work I want to do. There are a few kind of people I want to work with:

1. Adolescents in psych wards

2. Adolescents in bad straits (foster care, runaways, abuse cases, whatever)

3. Prison populations

4. Addicts

5. Domestic violence survivors

6. Sex workers

I know the proper path is to go to school for this shit, and after several years of mind-numbing classes, finally get into the field, and be pinned down to that job or that city for several more years while I pay off my loans and learn how to do my work, because it is almost a 100% guarantee that nothing I learn in school will apply to the field.

But maybe I’m looking for a combo option for discrete needs. I need a job to support myself. I need to work to assist a population I’m drawn toward. I need to not be unhappy. These don’t all have to fit together with one overkill solution. The work that fulfills me doesn’t need to be the work I do for pay, because when those two get linked, I become trapped in a job that might go sour in a city I don’t like anymore.

Anyway, just babbling through my process.