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Road Not Taken

I had my grad school interview on Monday. It didn’t go how I thought it was going to go. That isn’t to say it went badly. I didn’t trip or pronounce banal incorrectly or make a fool of myself in any obvious way. It was fine. I think I might get in. 

I just don’t think I’m going to go. 

One thing about me is I’m good at school. I’m not trying to be a snot or anything. Some people are good at driving race cars. I’m good at school. Give me a book and a set of instructions and the promise of some positive reinforcement if I do it right, and I’m happy as a lark. I like order. I like reading. And, frankly, I like being told how smart I am. 

The hardest part of the transition to adulthood has been the openness of it all: with no report card every semester, I’ve had to create my own rubric to measure my progress, whatever that means. And since I’m not flying to the moon or publishing wildly successful vampire novels or saving the world, I tend to be sort of hard on myself. You should be doing more, I tell myself constantly. More, more, more. 

I think grad school seemed like the perfect plan because it would have hit two buttons at once: the school thing (have I mentioned I like school?) and also the life thing. “I’m in grad school,” I could say when people asked what I was up to. “You’re in grad school,” I could tell myself on all those nights I couldn’t sleep from wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Never mind that I wasn’t so sure anymore that I was actually interested in the field I was planning to study: the studying itself was a way to buy myself some time before I had to make the big decisions. A way to feel like I was doing something without actually having to commit. 

Except it is a commitment. A huge one, in time and money and effort. And as I listened to the assistant dean explain the program–and it is a good program, I think, full of the order and reading and discussion I like so much–and wondered why I didn’t feel more excited, a thought occurred to me:

this is too high a price to pay just to stave off the fear.

And so I’m going to tread lightly in 2009. I’m going to learn to live with the uncertainty. I’m going to write and cook and love my family and wait until the next step is presented to me. 

I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with my life.

I don’t know. 
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
And that’s enough for now.