You may have noticed that I’m not doing much with my life right now. And you may even be concerned about this. Don’t be. It’s intentional. Sort of.
In my last post, I talked about how I developed a severe case of perfectionism to combat my perceived and actual overall suckery. I became a perfectionist some time in junior high, but my perfectionism lasted clear into college. At some point during the first semester of my senior year, though, I got all self-reflective. And I realized that staying up all night to work on essays so that I would receive an A+ instead of an A really wasn’t that beneficial to my life. I was even able to recognize that I could probably receive straight C’s and it wouldn’t adversely affect my life trajectory. After all, I wasn’t trying to go to grad school at Harvard or anything.
So I had this revelation, but I couldn’t stop with the studying and the endless essay revisions and the nearly subconscious desire to be perfect in school. I just couldn’t.
At that point, I decided that I needed to take a break from achievement. I decided that I better not continue my education right away, because I couldn’t be trusted to not be completely absorbed by the studying and the working too hard. For the past eight or ten years, the pursuit of academic perfection had totally consumed me, and I’d failed to learn other stuff, like, cooking, and ummm…crafts! And proper bar etiquette.
Also, I didn’t really have any career goals. Just nothing really appealed to me. I stressed out for a lot of my college career about this and I changed my major a bunch of times and obsessed over identifying my "life calling." It got so exhausting that I was finally just like, “Whatever, I’m going to be a secretary.”
So this year that I’m living in Morgantown and working at this weird little temp “job” was slated to be my year of learning how to live like your average, non-psychotic, non-perfectionist. I wanted to learn how to do things, and not just how to read and write about things. I wanted to do all those things that always seemed appealing to me but that I felt I didn’t have time for because I had to study.
I don’t know. I guess I’ve had moderate success. I’ve become a decent seamstress. Competent but not great. My house and room are still a wreck. I was really hoping to become more organized but that’s proven super challenging to me. I have tried some new recipes. I’ve discovered that I don’t really like to cook, but I am learning a little bit.
I am still a total failure in the social department, but that’s already been discussed on this blog. My main regret about my college years is that I didn’t try harder to make friends, because now I just feel like I’ve missed the boat. I think I may have to just move and start over. And yeah, bar etiquette is still baffling and horrifying to me.
I still don’t feel ready to go back to school. I can’t be trusted. But I’ve been looking around for more career-y jobs. I hope that if I find one I will pursue it with the appropriate level of effort and not go overboard. Only time will tell.
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