For a long time, the inability to find a career or pursue a trade felt like a fault. My first job out of college was in retail full-time. It was fun. It was demanding, and after ten months, I took a pay cut to move to a position in a factory that shortened my commute. I loved that job and hated it. After a few years, that company didn’t pay their bills, and I took another pay cut to join the finance department for a different company in a different industry. Every move I made, moved me a few steps closer but also a few steps back. I went from one job to the next saying “yes” to multiple hats and diverse responsibilities. When I realized there was no room for growth, I reached out to former managers for advice, searching for ways to leverage my previous postitions to propel me into something new and lucrative.
I thought that I had failed to “figure it out” and that I was less intelligent or less talented than everyone else. I thought I had missed the train that led me to where I was SUPPOSED to be. There was a nagging feeling that I hadn’t made it. I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath in 2015, and her fig tree anology gutted me. During my twenties, all of these “figs” loomed over me, and I couldn’t choose. I scoured through job postings and career quizzes and “ideal cities for young people.” I dreaded that one day, I would be old and regretful, wondering how I wasted all of my talents.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Now, in 2025, it all looks different. Time moves so fast. Yes, I wore many hats and budgeted every cent. Yes, I felt lost and confused a lot of the time. Yes, struggles often felt like they would never get easier, but woven through all those feelings and low points were plans and goals and passion. I worked multiple jobs. I adopted a dog at age 23. I bought a house at age 25. I paid off my student loans before I turned 27 – just under five years after graduating a four year private school. I was in a band for a minute. I rented a floor sander and redid my wood floors. I learned how to tile a shower surround. I kept painting and reading and creating – just to take those pieces apart and create something else.
“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know, you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”
― Oscar Wilde
I am not my title. I am not the me I was yesterday. This dynamic life has been so good to me.