Last week, some coworkers and I grabbed sandwiches from the local deli and ate lunch at a picnic table outside our office. One of the women, about whom I normally have positive feelings, started to ask me about graduate school. As I felt my entire body go tense, I had to remind myself that, contrary to what I might believe sometimes, my anxiety is not immediately visible to everyone who might glance at me.
Leaning forward over the picnic table, as if she were anticipating a good answer, my coworker asked me what programs I was looking at.
I shrugged. “Don’t know yet. Maybe art history. Maybe education. Not really sure.”
When I am desperately trying to keep panic at bay, for some reason I also drop the subjects of my sentences and speak in fragments.
She persisted. “Well, where do you want to live? Like, where would you like to end up?”
Again I shrugged. “Charleston. Tucson. Denver. Indianapolis. Don’t know.”
“Well have you looked at programs in those areas?”
In my mind, my composure started to squeak uncomfortably, like a guitar string wound too tightly.
“Hey, I just don’t know,” I said more firmly, smiled and changed the subject. For the rest of lunch, I tried to smother my flailing anxieties with the fresh mozzarella in my sandwich.
What I had been doing without realizing it was emitting the visual and vocal cues that I had adopted during my senior year and immediately after: the admission of uncertainty, followed by a polite request—usually indicated by tone or body language—that the subject be dropped.
Looking at it from a reasonable point of view (a.k.a. not mine), it’s not an unusual thing about which to be curious. My coworkers and extended family care about me or at least are interested in what my plans are for the future. Since my fear of those very plans and that very future is mostly internal, they wouldn’t necessarily realize they had hit on a sore subject. The issue I sometimes face with those people, who are interested in my plans but don’t know me well enough to read my signals, is that they care enough not to accept polite deflection.
They have the best intentions, and I have a profound appreciation for how fresh mozzarella can come in handy in defusing my mounting hysteria.
Late in my senior year, it wasn’t uncommon for certain words or phrases to be banned from polite conversation amongst classmates. Words like…resume. And what are you doing next year? And So’s your old man!—wait, that’s The Music Man… but still: they all spelled Trouble with a capital T, and that rhymed with “me,” and that stood for, “Oh God, what the hell am I doing with my life?”
And I don’t know never seemed to be a good enough answer.
We are a generation of over-achievers. It seems slightly arrogant and more than trite to say it, but qualifying many of my contemporaries as “rabidly ambitious” doesn’t hit too far from the mark. My best friend mused in an email recently that our generation will probably never stop asking "what’s next?" because we were brought up to believe we could do anything and have everything. As we get older, that all-encompassing Everything evolves into a much more specific Something: the goal, the life we decide we want for ourselves. Mathematics leads us to believe that the best way to get from ourselves as Point A to our goal as Point B is a straight line, and then all of our "what’s next?" questions line themselves up along that path. So it would seem like all you need to do is choose a Point B—a goal, the life you want—and start moving forward.
As usual, the practice of personal mathematics and physics leaves a lot to be desired.
I’m the person who stands for twenty minutes in front of the mascara display, paralyzed by the excess of options. And from this point I am supposed to make major life decisions?
Awesome.
I realize the flaw in my formula: that I am assuming there can only be one point B. In a way, that’s how I think because that’s how I was brought up. My parents followed a straight line, and they measured out the distance in their minds after which they would be There, at Point B, when they could enjoy the fruits of their labor and the contentedness of having achieved the goal. By their measurements, they should be There. They are of the right age, their children are grown, and they have worked so hard to get There. But, in the quintessential Modernist bait-and-switch, there is no There, there. Jobs are still frustrating, bills still need paying, and life still isn’t easy, or at least as easy as they would’ve hoped by now. From early on in my own life I’m watching my parents experience a kind of existential crisis in the middle of theirs. And I wonder if they are asking themselves and each other what’s next.
The logical alternative to a Point B is a host of other points, C through Z and beyond. In reality, though, you do have to choose to a certain extent: what job you want and what degree you’ll need to get to be a viable candidate for that job. And which tests you’ll have to take to apply for the degree you’ll need to get to be a viable candidate for the job.
And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around.
It’s about this point in the conversation that I start hyperventilating and looking for an emergency stash of mozzarella.
The most obvious fear is that I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong decision: get a degree that already stands a good chance at being economically useless (alas for the liberal arts) and then end up not liking the job I may or may not get. What I tell myself, when I’m pretending I’m a rational, mature human being, is that there is no law of physics that will make all graduate schools in the world instantly dissolve after I achieve that one degree I choose. (What can I say? Even when I’m pretending to be rational, I’m still sarcastic. The imagination only goes so far.) The point is that I can always change my mind and go back to school, seeking out another goal and another path towards it.
The less obvious fear, the bottom-dweller anxiety, is that I am afraid I won’t be brave enough to make the change: to go back to school and choose another life. I already know that change is hard and deeply scary, and I imagine it will only get harder and scarier as I get older. I’ve never been very brave by nature—I’m a lot of things, but courageous has never been one of them. So the panic I’m feeling now, closing off my airways and crocheting my intestines, is actually a manifestation of something I do know, not something I don’t: that if I choose wrong now, I may not be brave enough to undo and redo in the future.
The funny thing about Life (capital L) is that it is uncontrollable and inevitable. These are a few of my least favorite things.
So what do I do, other than curl up under my desk and eat my way towards lactose intolerance?
I think about my life so far, not as I’ve imagined it or planned it, but as I’ve actually experienced it: my actual, daily life (lower case l). I have experienced that if I have Cheez-Its in the house, I will eat them all in one sitting, so it is best not to keep Cheez-Its in the house. I have learned that my credit card spending has an ebb and flow throughout the cycle, so just because I’m having a slow week doesn’t mean I should buy that extremely desirable but ridiculously expensive dress. That relationships are hard: that there is not a foreseeable point at which I will experience complete romantic resolution and ride off into the sunset as the credits roll. Also, that my boyfriend is so much better than any romantic lead I could write for myself, because he’s real, and as an individual person over whom I have no control, he decided to love me. That only eating carbohydrates for breakfast will leave me ravenous by 10:30 am, and that those incredible, satisfying showdowns I imagine and script so carefully in the shower will never happen. That having good people in your life makes it better, whether you’re having a good day or a bad day. That happiness is not a constant state: you have a baseline of factors contributing to your general contentment, and an odd sprinkling of small elements in your day that can make you enjoy the whole shebang a little bit more. So for the love of God, pet that dog and shove your head in that lilac bush, because it will make you happy, and that is not a small thing.
Above all, though, I have experienced that there has not been anything yet that has killed me.
I have very wise friends. One, who knows exactly when to gently apply tough love, told me that thousands of people go through the graduate school application process every year and very few experience mental breakdowns. Another, while we were medicating our mutual bad day with blue-cheese burgers, told me that life is a collection of good days and bad days, and if you have more good days than bad, you’ve done okay.
I am responsible for who I am now, and who I’m becoming. However, I am not responsible for my Entire Future right here, right now. There is a place between taking no agency, blaming fate and old decisions, and assuming responsibility for my entire life as of this very moment. I seek that place, the middle-ground, because I imagine that the weather is very good there: an excellent climate for my chronic anxiety.
In the mean time, I’m going to smell lilacs and nudge my way into my future, buying a GRE book and perhaps a mozzarella sandwich and learning how to be okay with a scary answer to the scary question: “What’s next?”
I don’t know.
