Trying to Feel Powerful

The most difficult thing about being a previously-productive, underemployed Boomerang Kid is feeling like your life is no longer your own. As much as my parents' tendency to treat me like a teenager annoys the fuck out of me, I can't blame them, so I keep that sentiment largely to myself. I have (stupidly) made myself beholden to a couple of major corporate banks in various ways, so I can't just up and take off somewhere to find work or take an unpaid internship that could lead to a good job because I have debts to be paid. I don't make enough money to do what I want to do along with what I have to do. I feel powerless at times.

That said, I am doing my best to take control of the areas of my life that I can control. I can control my health. I'm doing pretty well on that front with my strict vegetarianism and almost daily walks. Also, being completely broke has made it easier for me to live a less consumerist lifestyle. Because I have to make what I have stretch so far, I focus on small experiences that make me happy, rather than junk I don't need. I am encouraging my own intellectual development by reading, writing, and following politics from largely independent media. I am making a conscious effort to meet new people interested in the same political and religious angles as I am.

Sometimes, when I look at my overall financial picture, I'm terrified. When I look at my actual job situation as opposed to what I believed (and was taught) it would be at this point in my life, I feel resentful. These feelings make me feel trapped, but denying them would be to my detriment. I want to feel them without dwelling on them, then move on to things over which I have greater control. I have to face reality, but not all of my reality is bad. I want to give myself peace, empowerment, and love.

I am incredibly thankful for a family that loves me and is able to house and feed me while I go through this era of my life. I am thankful for friends who try to understand my financial and dietary limitations. I am thankful for the little income I have because without it I'd be royally screwed. I have so much more than so many, and I have to remember to be grateful.

So Far from Where I Started...

Today, I started reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Yes, I realize that I'm reading it about ten years too late. However, it has me thinking about who I was in high school and who I am now.

I used to be incredibly shy. I have an introverted personality now, but I have a great deal more confidence than I used to have. I need plenty of time alone and a little time to adjust my thought patterns before socializing, and large groups of people other than my close friends sometimes wear me out. However, I have a capacity to enjoy social situations, even meeting new people, in a way I never could as a kid. While I need to be alone to recharge, even away from my family and my best friends, social engagement makes me feel wonderfully alive, where in high school I often just felt scared.

My shy, quiet high school personality allowed me to think in ways that others at my school didn't. Though I started high school with the conservative Christian outlook with which I had been raised in my church, it didn't last. I did not understand the process as it happened, but I look back on it with the understanding gained by watching others struggling with deconversion. As I listened, learned, and observed, I found that my religion did nothing but add to my sense of (undeserved) guilt and judgmentality. Yet, knowing that I was no longer a Believer made me feel guilty, as well. I began to show glimmers of the open mind that is now, perhaps, my defining characteristic outside of my intellect. University life cemented this as a compassionate and loving perspective.

I have bouts of shyness and intense insecurity that will probably plague me for the rest of my life. There are certain spotlights I will never be able to stand in. However, I recognize my needs for both isolation and social engagement, and I'm not terrified anymore. As for religion and politics, I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum from where I started. I'm a progressive, a secular humanist, and an atheist. I don't judge people from living in ways that make them happy as long as they aren't hurting anyone. The girl that grew so much in four years of high school is now a woman who has grown so much more in the six years since.

Sometimes, I get so wrapped up in my current problems that I forget to take stock of where I started. I have to give myself credit for what matters most: the changes that have made me a good person, and those that have allowed me to live in the world more that I ever imagined I would.

Facing Reality and Staying Positive

You can't accomplish happiness unless you stop feeling sorry for yourself. Sometimes the world sucks, but you are not powerless. I have set major goals, along with mini-goals that make up the process of achieving the big ones, that will allow me to gain freedom from oppressive debt. If it turns out that I hate my full-time job when I find one, being free of credit card debt will free me to do something about it.

However, this is not one of those "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" stories. If I am able to reach my goals (and I have full faith at this point that I will), I will have had lots of help. First of all, I live with my parents. I have no rent, utility bills, grocery costs, or laundry costs. Otherwise, all the positive attitude in the world would not help me out of my financial mess. Secondly, the most promising full-time job opening I have come across is with my retired mother's former employer. The Big Boss used to be my mother's supervisor, but now he runs the entire facility, and he has offered to meet with me personally. If he is able to get me hired there, I will owe my mother even more for her years of hard work, as well as the boss for taking a chance on a highly educated young woman who, unfortunately, has no full-time job experience.

So, chances matter. Luck matters. Other people's choices matter. However, just as attitude without opportunity accomplishes very little, so does opportunity without the right attitude. In less than a week, my entire outlook has been transformed. The opportunity to seek work at this place has been there for months, but my attitude and refusal to be flexible prevented me from accepting it. I wanted what I wanted and nothing else. But, confronted with the reality of my situation and trying to face that reality has forced me to seize my own power. I may not have the life I planned on having at (almost) 25, but I can make the life I *do* have as pleasant and happy as possible. As it turns out, that's pretty damned happy. By setting achievable goals and moving toward them, I can actually work toward changing my overall life situation for the better while creating lifelong habits that will contribute to my well being far beyond the turbulent twenties.

By engaging in the life I have and the resources available to me right now, I feel entirely different: happy, loving, optimistic...

POWERFUL.

My life is mine, and it is the only life I will ever have. I am forgiving myself for never living up to my previous perfectionist standards and letting go of my (admittedly often deserved) resentment of the people who created such a shitty job market or lied to my generation about where education would get us.

The take-home: set big goals, set small goals, follow through with them, and let go of the negative.

Stay positive.

On the Bright Side

Life feels less like a trap when you take as much of it as possible into your own hands. Initially, I began that process subconsciously with my choice to stop eating meat. I now self-identify as a vegetarian, and I eat a vegan diet when at home. This choice was about ethics, but it also allowed me to take control of my health. Before I knew it, I was full of energy, so I started taking long walks every evening. The combination of a healthy, plant-based diet and increased physical activity has resulted in a weight loss of 25 pounds in less than two months. However, none of this was part of the goal, which was solely to stop eating meat.

At this point, I am taking active control over my life. I am entering into a phase of intense goal orientation aimed at changing my day-to-day habits, my attitude, and the long-term focus of my life. I have made my health improvements into a conscious effort, rather than a secondary consequence of another choice. In the last two to three days, I have taken active steps toward improving almost all areas of my life, including increasing my walk length, training my dog, reconnecting with old friends, meeting new people, focusing on independent intellectual development through daily reading and writing, making an appointment to volunteer, and making an appointment with someone who could very well help me land a decent paying job.

Admittedly, most of my goal-seeking actions are related to my daily life. However, I believe daily life to be of paramount importance, as it is incredibly difficult to focus on the future when you cannot even enjoy the moments around which your days revolve. In fact, I was on one of my meandering late-night walks when I had a serious epiphany about what I want from life. Success in one area often leads to success in others.

Here's the rub: I am letting go of the idea that I should be perfect. I have spent too much of my life anxiety-ridden and feeling paralyzed because I was afraid to fail. My obsession with perfection has too often prevented me from acting in ways that would have positively affected my quality of life. I refuse to wallow in my own self-doubt anymore.

I am an almost-25-year-old, Master's-degree-holding Boomerang kid, and I refuse to feel powerless any longer. My life begins NOW.

Confronting Emotional Demons

It has occurred to me that I am, perhaps, a bit too sensitive about my life situation. I cannot have a conversation with my mother about my financial issues and life goals without coming away feeling that she is completely unsupportive. Simply reading that statement, I understand that it is an entirely illogical perception. It's likely that she's simply worried. However, my perception is what it is, regardless of whether my reaction is emotional or logical.

My best explanation is twofold. First, I am feeling insecure about my place in the world, which I think is understandable. Secondly, I am feeling crowded because I have zero private physical or emotional space. Essentially, being confronted about my life when I am genuinely trying to get things together turns me into a tiger in a corner. I lash out and try to get free.

There isn't a complete solution to this issue right now. I am working toward important goals in every aspect of my life, including finding a job that will allow me to pay off my debts so that I can move forward, but my mother's negativity, real or perceived, about my long term goals only hurts my productivity. I am not in a position where I can move out of my parents' house, which is essentially what would have to happen in order for me to find permanent private space. A closed door is not an effective barrier in this house.* My temporary solution is to ask my mother not to ask me about my plans if she can't react positively to them because it doesn't lead anywhere good for either of us, especially non-verbal reactions, which are the ones that tend to cause the most trouble because they are so easily misinterpreted. In a more long term, impermanent sense, I may start spending time at the local library on days when I am not working. It would do us all well to have a little space from each other.

Although I have had some clear setbacks, I am trying to be more positive and more proactive in all areas of my life. Thus far, this blog has been a place of purging. I can express things here that I cannot express otherwise, and it helps me feel my emotions and let go of them. In a roundabout way, it allows me to ACT. I will make a concerted effort to post about my goals, though only after I accomplish important steps. I'm making positive progress, and whenever I feel new habits are well established, I'll share them proudly.

*What bothers me most about this fact is that I lived with various roommates over the course of six years and never had this problem, but suddenly I do. To me, a closed door means, "Unless you have something of immediate importance to say, leave me alone." I need to work on my introverted nature before pet peeves like this destroy me.

The Emotional Pendulum of Youthful Underemployment

For a couple of days, I was walking around filled to the limit with confidence and hope. Finally, I am willing to admit to myself what I've wanted all along. I want to join the Peace Corps. In the past few days, I've been making plans to do volunteering to beef up my experience in health and ESL, emailing a PC recruiter, filling out paperwork, and generally being quite productive in life. My confidence has been further bolstered by my weight loss, which was driven by my relatively recent ethics-based vegetarianism. I'm rightly proud that I've stuck to my guns on that issue for almost two months, and as a result I've reduced both my cognitive dissonance and my waistline.

HOWEVER: enter my financial picture. I wish wholeheartedly that an important concept had occurred to me many years ago, so that I would not be in the mess that I am in right now: Debt enslaves you to a life that you may not want, often as a low wage employee to a company you can't stand. I'm facing the prospect of leaving a part time job I enjoy for a full time job that I know could be a miserable grind that makes me hate myself every day I get up and go to it. Here's the problem: college has me thousands of dollars in credit card and educational debt. The educational debt can be paid through income based repayment and can be deferred easily for Peace Corps service. However, the credit card debt cannot.

I am faced with a decision of remaining enslaved to two big banks and being unable to do Peace Corps service for years because I'd be unable to pay toward my debts while volunteering, or I can choose indentured servitude for a year and get myself together BEFORE I work toward what I really want to do. I need to knock down a few barriers first. It seems to me that I must swallow my pride, bite the bullet, and apply for the one job I've said since childhood that I would not do.

What I'm Doing Now - Career Addition

My entire post-secondary education was geared toward preparing myself for work in the public sector. However, considering funding cuts, hiring freezes, and the like at the federal, state, and local levels of government, I have resigned myself to the fact that I am going to have to do something different for awhile. Right now, I am trying to figure out what that is.

While I was in graduate school, I took several education credits as electives. As it stands, I need one online class, and student teaching (one semester, unpaid) or an internship (a full academic year, paid), to finish my alma mater's teacher certification program.* Because I am not certain that education would be a suitable career path for me, I became a substitute teacher so that I can get paid while I find the answer to that question.

While some friends view my notoriously opinionated and loud personality as an impediment to the teaching profession, others view it as a symptom of my passion for learning. I love to learn, but I love to share what I've learned, as well. I have had many wonderful, educational discussions with friends in which we each taught and learned. I think that less intellectual friends find my occasional didacticism obnoxious, and I am absolutely certain that sharing knowledge with teenagers is different than sharing knowledge with college educated, intellectual adults. However, for the moment, I have a direction. If it doesn't work, I'll have to stick my toes into a different pond.


*While public education has been hit hard along with other public sector fields, school districts in large cities are still hiring hundreds of teachers every year.

How I Became a Boomerang Kid

My position in life is not unique. A large number of American college graduates have (uncharacteristically) moved back into their parents' homes due to the abysmal performance of the job market. Like me, many of them are full of mixed feelings, alternately embarrassed, comfortable, depressed, numb, and hopeful for the future. However, each of us has a different journey toward a renewed declaration of our personal independence.

I have been told time and time again that this should be the happiest time of my life. "When I was your age, I didn't have anything to be anxious about!" "You're young. You should be enjoying your life!" "Your generation whines too much." You know what? Fuck those people. Yes, I said it. I've had fun in my young life, occasionally too much fun for my own good. However, ask most twenty-somethings: overall, we are not happy. Youth is full of turmoil, as are current events, and we are just trying to begin our lives.

From a different and, from my observations, more accurate perspective, I've been told by many forty-somethings who haven't whitewashed their memories that their lives are far better now than they were at 25. Most quarterlifers will eventually find jobs, long-term relationships, and hobbies that might mean happiness. Currently, though, many of us feel distinctly stuck in circumstances that are largely out of our control, and it sucks.

Ending up back in my parents' house resulted from a buildup of events going back several months from the time I moved. In February, I began the process of applying to Teach for America. After putting in much effort, I was rejected in April. This rejection was a landmark in my young life because it was my first major job rejection. I had never had a problem getting hired prior to Teach for America.

Although it rocked my sense of self to the core, the rejection did not come as a surprise. In fact, I had been surprised to be granted a personal interview after an awkward and uncompelling phone interview. Unfortunately, there were still terrible consequences to finding out absolutely 100% for certain that I, a heretofore successful (if anxiety-ridden) 24 year old graduate student, would be moving back to a much-maligned, podunk West Texas town to live with my parents. I did not even finish the research paper for a class I loved prior to experiencing a slightly-more-than-minor breakdown right at the end of the spring semester. I was a walking, breathing anxiety attack waiting to happen unless I had taken a double dose of Nyquil just to be able to sleep for awhile. I alternated between numbly watching television and having colossal freak out moments.

On June 1, 2011, I moved back into my parents' house after six years out of it. Things haven't been entirely what I expected. If I am honest with myself and others, this is what I needed to improve both my financial situation and my mental health. Ups and downs - I got 'em. This is my forward path.