In a few short months, I will be graduating.
As that day creeps closer, I hear the same question over and over again:
"What's next?"
I know "hate" is a strong word but I really HATE that question.
How can I boldly proclaim "what's next," when I don't even know what's going on right now?
I don't have my own living space. I'm not even renting. My girlfriend and I bounce back and forth between my mother's house and my father's house.
I am unemployed and have no prospective jobs on the horizon.
My bank account balance currently sits at $17.67 (which is actually way more than usual) but once I go pick up my anxiety medication from the pharmacy this afternoon it will be more like $5.00.
Mama helps me the best she can (because she is amazing) but on a public school teacher's salary, her money can only go so far, especially since it isn't just me she's helping. It's me, plus my two younger sisters, plus my girlfriend whose parents care more about their goddamn "principles" than their own daughter. Ah, but I digress...
I had been working on a certain graduate school application, but something was holding me back from completing it, and now I know what it was. Deep down in my soul, I know "what I want to be when I grow up." It isn't a pastor, or a professor, or even a forensic anthropologist. It is not something I have to become. It is who I have always been.
I am a writer.
I have been afraid to embrace that truth but there is no denying it anymore. My soul yearns for it. It is the very blood that flows through my veins.
Sadly, it isn't enough to sit around in my (father's) house and write all day. In this fucked up world we live in, we have to earn a little thing called money in order to do a little thing called survive. How do people do it? How do they continue, day in and day out, at a job they hate (or even worse, a job they've just settled for)? Kudos to those people. They have some serious perseverance. I just can't do that. I can't spend every day of my life doing something I hate. I can't even spend it doing something that's just "okay." For me, life is pointless if it is not spent doing what I love, and what I truly love is writing.
And that terrifies me.
Writing itself doesn't scare me. (It thrills me.) It is the idea of having to turn my writing into an item to be consumed...that is what scares me. I don't know how to "make a living" by writing. I just know how to write. So, here I sit, staring at this computer screen...no less perturbed than when I began typing...and I still don't have an answer for "what's next." I'm just here. Stuck.
Until next time,
D
