joie de vivre

"The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?"

I remember being naively optimistic during my early college years when I thought that I could be anything I wanted, do anything I liked, and all the pieces would just fit together and tick along like rotating gears in a clock. First I wanted to be an architect, and then I didn't. Then I was set on being a travel writer, thinking that I could actually travel the world on someone elses' wallet and all I'd have to do was write about it. And there'd be a naturally captivated audience at my fingertips, because I could turn words into magic, even if writing about a banal pile of rocks at the edge of a Coors Lite white-sand beach. Now that I'm technically "graduated", the real world is mowing my wildly rampant expectations down like a bulldozer. And those rose-colored glasses? Shattered a long ways ago.

I'm starting to rethink a lot of the plans I made when I was still safely secure behind my books, papers, and CLICC lab computers even just a few months ago. If I go to live in Australia and play and play and play and maybe work a little but all the while still playing, what will I do when I come back? Can I just jump smoothly onto the career train like I never got off? Won't people look at my resume and think... wtf did you do that year? If I get into graduate school, how will I afford it with the already hovering slabs of student loans above my head? Or even worse, what if I DON'T get into graduate school... what will I do then? What if I don't want to get my PhD, what will I do with a useless MA in English? What if I'm stuck in LA forever, and never get to relocate to even as close as NYC? Would I really have to get a 9-5? Or at the lowest pond-scum point, what if I CAN'T even get a desk job and am stuck moping around for who knows how long? What if I can't shake this noose of uncertainty and apprehension from around my neck, and the knot just slowly tightens itself with each day past, until...?

All I've ever wanted was to not have a giant wall ahead of me, to have a clear, open road, winding freely and endlessly to an existential wonderland. But now I can't see the paving anymore. The road just ends at my feet while I stare confoundedly out onto a dry, vacant space. I guess that obviously means I have to pave the road myself. but what if I really don't know where I'm going? or what if I can't go anywhere at all?

I think this "life is a road" Robert Frost metaphore is starting to get old. Don't you think?