My Options Felt Mysteriously Limited.
In spite of my new job at the museum and all of my wonderful colleagues, I started to get bored. I loved the work I was doing, and I loved the place. I even loved the people. But – as was the case with every permanent job I ever had – I felt stuck within a few months. I started to question if I wanted to work for the museum for the rest of my life, like so many of my colleagues seemed to be doing.
I hadn’t had a full-time job in a very long time. My commitment to my future felt tenuous at best. I took the job because I needed a job; but what if I had to stay here forever?
I started to question the rest of my life, too. I was still going to therapy every Tuesday. We were talking about my dreams, analyzing what they meant. But what difference did it make? I mean, it was cool to understand whatever symbolism or meaning might be contained in my subconscious, but it had no effect on my conscious life.
And on weekends, I was still somehow enmeshed with Gregg. I had wonderfully independent weeks where I’d get up, hang out with smart, independent women all day, and then go home to a blissfully empty house. Sure, I was still drinking at the local bars, but sometimes I left at midnight. I had a job to do!
Then on the weekends, Gregg would reappear as though I actually wanted him there. I didn’t want to be lonely, but I didn’t want to be with Gregg, either. My options felt mysteriously limited.
I didn’t know what was limiting them.
Every morning felt like, Oh no, not again. And every evening felt like, Everything sucks. And in between, when I was actually doing my job or drinking – the only two things I ever did – I felt simultaneously numb and guilty. The alcohol no longer muted the guilt and it never created spontaneous joy.
But I thought it would. I thought if I tried hard enough, did the right things, drank the right drinks, went to the right places, hung with the right people, then all that fun I’d discovered during my freshman year of college would come charging back, full-force, and I’d feel joy again.
Somehow, instead, the world was letting me down. All the good things were tainted by … something. I didn’t know what was flattening me, graying out my future.
I felt my future as a bright, sparkly thing that had been dropped in a mud puddle.
It never occurred to me that I’d singlehandedly created the mud puddle – and dropped that sparkly thing right in its midst. Then I’d stepped on it and rolled it around to make sure it was completely destroyed.
When it came to the surface – like it did when I got my new job – I doused it in mud again. Then I blamed the world for being too muddy.
I didn’t know I was making choices about my life. I didn’t consider that my drinking played any part in my inability to smile, my dead eyes, my severely compromised future. I thought life was just happening to me, one agonizing minute at a time, and that I had no choices about how it went.
I was 24 years old and my life felt over.
At least, I thought, I’ve been spared from all the really awful things like death and jail and mental institutions.
I had no idea how close I was to all of that.