I want a safe space to talk about this but I no longer feel ‘safe’ talking about it on my actual journal, so. I guess this is where it has to go.
I’m sort of wondering if I should take an MFA in creative writing or in poetry. Or at least apply to one of the programs.
The other option basically is academic editing and publishing.
I am not really sure if either of these choices will completely make me happy, but they certainly offer a more viable future than anything else I can think of at the moment. (Well, the MFA might make me happy. If I got into a good program, and if I wasn’t complete shit as a writer. Need validation? Who? Me?)
I’m twenty-seven years old. I’m not a teenager anymore, you know? I have very little time left to fuck around. I told Joe on the phone, “Playtime ends when you hit thirty,” and it’s true. No one ever says it, but really, you can be a teenager and a screw-up until you hit thirty. After that, it’s like, what the fuck are you doing with your life? Who the fuck are you?
One of the biggest things about my depression is that I never thought I’d live past thirty. I’m rapidly approaching that window, and I suppose part of the whole reason I’m thinking so seriously (and somewhat suddenly) about what I’m going to do when I finish my degree is that I’ll have to grow up. I’ll have to make those life calls about a career that I never really thought I’d have to, because I always assumed I’d be dead. (Sort of like how when you were five, you thought you’d get a pony for Christmas, only less with the cute and more with the morbid.)
I should be glad I’m alive to celebrate it, but I’m terrified of it at the same time. I’m also not sure I want to celebrate it. I stopped thinking about my future in positive terms about the same time most girls started thinking about boyfriends (or girlfriends) and worrying about prom. (Maybe that’s a value judgment on their lives. In which case, I meant no harm. I’m saying that that’s what was happening in my life, and how I felt everyone around me was by comparison.)
I never wanted to ‘grow up.’ Maybe part of it is that, too. I couldn’t face the fact that my life really, really, really sucked, and it hurt. Everything that I wanted for myself I fucked up and ruined, and now … well. Now finishing my degree is sort of like coming in dead last on a marathon. I’m finishing, but that’s nowhere near as exciting as if I’d come in first. And I could have come in first.
The point is, ultimately, that the time has come to choose a new path and make new choices. I’m not saying I’m going to be a new person. I think that I’m pretty much settled into who and what I am, and short of changing my physical appearance - which I could stand to do, and would possibly help not only my self-esteem but my health, which is more important - I can’t really worry about changing anything emotionally right now. I need to be stable as I am.
So the dilemma remains and nothing is solved. Boy, that’s helpful, isn’t it.
