An essay for my Peace Corps application...

...which turned into something else all together. Maybe some of you will enjoy and/or relate. I found writing it a very cathartic experience.



Since leaving graduate school and beginning to look for jobs, I am invariably asked the question, “What do you want to do?” by curious family and friends. It is a harmless enough question, and one that is entirely appropriate to be asked at this point in my life. However, it is truly remarkable how such an innocuous inquiry can elicit a deep-seated feeling of panic inside my stomach each and every time it is prompted.

You are supposed to know what you want to do with your life! I tell myself. Stay calm, act confident, and quick! Say something that the average person will find completely ambiguous and inscrutable.

“I am thinking about policy work.”

Then smile and for heaven’s sake change the subject.

The truth is, of course, that I have no idea what I want to do with my life. In the community in which I grew up, this statement is practically blasphemy. I have been engineered and bred for career excellence through seventeen years of academic rigor, after school ballet lessons, math tutors, SAT prep classes, and oh yeah, a college education costing more than three hundred times the GDP of Somalia. Indecision is ok (who hasn’t felt that?) but in the meantime, act busy and put on a good front at church on Sunday. Thank God for “policy work”, whatever that is.

I suppose I have no one to blame but myself. Moving back home again is not for the faint of heart. There are far too many familiar faces to have any hope of weathering out the storm of career uncertainty in blissful anonymity.

I really did think that by this point in my life I would have a career path figured out. But perhaps that maybe that part of me is still eight years old, constantly changing the current response to “what I want to be when I grow up”. At that point in time the possibilities seemed endless, and they still do, which is probably the problem. I have been taught that I can be and do anything. But what if I don’t know what that is? What if there are too many options to choose just one?

The blame really should go to my incredibly patient and supportive parents. They actually agreed to let me study fine art in college, knowing full well the ramifications such a degree would bring. It just isn’t fair that I was blessed with so many options and such indulgent parents.

My friends from college fall into two camps: those who studied practical majors and have been employed for several years in large companies identified by multiple last names, and those who took are trying to apply their college-acquired pottery specialization in the real world. Oh, and eat too.

I have come up with a theory that my business-major friends from college, the ones now reading up on 401(k)s and investment strategies, probably missed out on some of the fun we art students had in college, but they are now having the last laugh. Then again, some of those practical minded friends have also confessed, behind closed doors of course, that they too have no idea what they are doing with their lives. “Really,” they tell me, “We are all just better at pretending that we have it all figured out.” If there was a class for that I really wish I had taken it. It would have come in handy at church on Sundays.