where i'll be

I was given a serious dose of reality earlier today, and I appreciated it. Thank you, Joe Harrington.

What kind of academic do you want to be?

I enjoy writing. Ideally, I would write all the time and get really good and make a living at it. I want to be surrounded by writers. I need to be surrounded by writers to inspire me and keep me believing that people do write even in the middle of lives like mine. (Thank you, Bathtub!) Now, does that put me in the academy or someplace else, like book publishing?

I don't know.

That's why I'm going to my first career counseling appointment tomorrow morning. I want to know what I want to do. What I can do. I want to know where I'll be in nine months. Still here in Lawrence? On the job market? Headed for a non-academic job? The career counselor is hopefully going to help me figure out my specific trajectory, and then I will take that knowledge to the job placement adviser, who will help with the actual job-getting, if need be.

But the immediate thing, the thing that will help me get a job in the end, is my thesis. My book. That's the business. I have to get on it, get back to it. Ben Cartwright wrote a pertinent and target-hitting blog this evening, inspired by the same meeting: What kind of habit do you have?. My new habit is writing a blog entry every day because, hey, it's writing. And then that frees up my mind for more writing, more creation. It's a habit I'm starting because other things haven't turned into habits. I need the every day habit that I don't have.

And now I'll quote Michael L. Johnson who reminded us today of his experience in a psychologist's office. "How's the writing going?" the psych. asked. "It's not," he replied. "Well, that's your problem." And he never went back to the psych.

All the anxiety, the stress, the imbalance, could that be because I'm not writing? Because I haven't even been journaling for the last four years like I did for my first twenty when I didn't have anxiety? Could it be that choosing to write has made it less of a necessity for me in everyday life? That's backwards. Let's turn it around, I say. Turn it upside down and write for the need and the want and the have to.

Okay, now I'm going to quote Oprah quoting Gary Zuvak in The Seat of the Soul: "When we align our thoughts, emotions, and actions with the highest part of ourselves, we are filled with enthusiasm, purpose, and meaning... When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of its soul, that is authentic empowerment." Is it wrong that Oprah is my spiritual guidance? I'm not aligned. Once I lost my faith, the Methodist faith that I had lived for twenty-one years, not knowing how not to believe, I lost my center. You can be spiritual without believing in God. Spiritual for me is nature, mountains, living Earth. Yoga may be spiritual (I'll find out soon). I feel so disconnected from everything--I give everything to everything else and am left with a not knowing me. I'm left without me when I give all of my time to work and school and not me and being and writing. "Writing is selfish," Johnson reminded us again today. I need to be more selfish in that way. It's too important.