Personal Battle With Career Identity

Ours is a nation based on career identities. Everyone defines themselves by what they do. I’m not so hip and arrogant as to say we don’t need a good paying job/ career to be comfortable; but what it comes down to is: people get a better feel for your personality after they ask “What do you do?”
I hate answering this question. I can remember in high school when my best friend asked me: “Erin, what are you going to do after you graduate?”
My answer: “I want to be a writer.” My best friend replied, “Writers don’t make money.”
I still, after earning my Bachelor’s degree in Communication Arts, do not know what I want to do for money. I hate all the jobs that would make me money. In Los Angeles, I found out that, if I wanted to work in the film industry, I had to work for producers – run around filing and making phone calls all the time. Somehow, it wasn’t appealing to me.
Growing up, I hated school – all the way until I graduated. I didn’t start to really like school until college – and that was only because I started learning about the things I actually wanted to learn about.
For someone who hates school in general, I could never teach.
I don’t want to be in food service.
I don’t want to be in health care.

Any other job is a means to an end for me. But to what end?
So tell me. What is there for people like me?
Is it that I have a genuine lack of interest in everything, or is that I am faceless if I refuse to let my career define me?
I am not even faceless,
I am a drifter.
And maybe a being a drifter is a bad thing, because it’s been over a year since I graduated college. What have I done? I have cared for children and washed dishes.
Perhaps I am absolutely freaking out because I’m unemployed, and have been for maybe two or three weeks. I have nowhere to go when I wake up and get dressed in the morning. It’s not awesome anymore.
Prayers would be appreciated.

I Need Help Writing

On my “writing” days that I don’t have work in the morning or some early appointment:
Wake up, lay in bed for a while thinking, smoke a cigarette, maybe go to the bathroom, get back in bed and lay there for at least 20 more minutes, make coffee, drink coffee while facebooking, open the document I’m working on, realize I’m out of coffee and cannot write without it, smoke a cigarette, get more coffee, start writing, hit a wall, facebook some more, force-write some crap that might work later, give up, text someone, see if anyone wants to hang out, read, think about cleaning, get dressed, fix hair, eat, hang out with Corey, complain about how I didn’t get much writing done today, the day is over, lay in bed and pray, think about how it will be easier to write tomorrow, until the next morning, get up and do it all again.

Great writers say there’s no such thing has writers block, and that writers need discipline. But sometimes, I just don’t know what to write about. Have I really reached that point in my life where I stopped caring passionately about things? How is it that I’ve become so nonchalant, my mind suddenly so old? Where have all my deep impulses for writing gone? How do I find that buried thing that needs plucked out of me and put on paper for all to see? I would just give up writing altogether, but I’d be severely unhappy if I did that. Help me.

We're Not Supposed to Worry

About two weeks ago, I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Shortly before this took place, I was talking with one of my best friends and roommate, Nadia, about various things that worry me. My career, my relationship, my family, what God would have me do. What if this, what if that, what if I mess everything up because I worry so much. I started worrying about worrying. “Nadia, I won’t be able to go to sleep because I’m so worried,” I said, to which she made the reply, “we’re not supposed to worry.”
Although this statement is one that I should know very well, it seems that this is the easiest of all things to forget. There it was, momentarily putting a stop to my circular thought process: “we are not supposed to worry.” How could it be so simple? Somehow, (even though people do lots of things they are not supposed to do), I thought, “well, if I’m not supposed to, then I won’t. How bad could my life be if I’m not even supposed to worry about it?”
I was able to sleep, but the next day my anxieties started all over again. Thereafter I was told that I have OCD, a form of which my compulsions ranged from getting affirmations from people on whether or not I was insane to checking my alarm clock seven times before sleeping. Naturally, I started obsessing about whether or not I actually had this disorder. No one had ever suggested this to me before, not after years of counseling, not after years of constantly checking with people to make sure that I am, in fact, not ugly. It perhaps makes sense that I had never been told that I had this disorder before, seeing that I had many more external issues to deal with; life events that were shaping and breaking who I was; I needed help coping, that was certain, but no one really bothered to put a label on what was going on in my mind.
As with any mental disorder, you cannot point do it like a tumor and say, “yes, you have cancer.” However I have decided that in order to get effective help for a type of torment that might be happening within one’s own mind, labels can be helpful. Get as second opinion as I might, the sentence, “we’re not supposed to worry,” is a simple statement that will always stick with me. From Nadia’s words of wisdom we must remember that no one can benefit from worry. It does not change a single thing about one’s life. OCD, as far as I see, is just a corruption of concern: doing something that we are not supposed to do; blown out of proportion like lots of gifts/neutralities we are given that are molded into sin. It doesn’t matter what chemical imbalance a person may or may not have; whether or not we believe in such labels. We are not supposed to worry.

Luke 12:25 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?

Anyway, here’s a poem from project that I’ve been working on, as humbly as I can offer it for a growing poet who’s not quite there yet:



People Think Way Too Much of Poetry

The pretentious flower wears glasses

thick framed, heavy.

His neck bends,

his stem close to breaking.

The pretentious flower has a hat,

baggy, knitted;

his petals hidden.

He wonders why he's a boy,

why he's a flower.

All the bees flock to him,

making food,

making poetry.

They don't care he's not a girl


like most flowers,

or that he's actually ugly, for that matter.

Random Thoughts, for Valentine's Day, 2012

I have been writing a lot of poetry lately. In fact, it's one of those things where I do a lot of it, and then leave it alone for a little while. Recently I went back to it, and I have been writing about two poems a week, and reading the poetry of others every day. I'm thoroughly enjoying this phase, as it is a useful tool in helping me to express myself until you know what I mean. Here's my most recent poem:


Nightmare


Was I asleep?
I remember you were
talking on the phone
while I gave you a foot rub.
I squeezed the muscle and
stroked the bones of both
your feet
before I noticed that you were talking
on the phone to someone.
I was there rubbing your feet.
But by that time
I’d vanished from your life
like the last time you used the bathroom
or the delivery guy who over-charged you.
I went into the other room as soon as I realized it
and started throwing knives at the wall so hard
they stuck, while I screamed and grunted
over and over.
You didn’t come in.
you just kept talking
to a mechanical voice on the other end.
It was like the dream where you laid
your head on my chest,
playing with my braids as
I took all of you in,
meditating on your dirt,
and making it to mud, but
the rocks covered my hands in blood
and I couldn’t make it clean, as if
you were smiling and giggling at
my witless jokes and
suddenly
started yelling and bashing in my teeth,
kicking my stomach,
shouting profanities
while I choked for air.
I screamed to wake myself, hoping
to find you in the kitchen
making some pancakes
or getting a drink of water,
the aroma sweet when you’d tell me it was a dream.

You weren’t abusing me when I woke,
or raising your voice,
or making breakfast or drinking water because you couldn’t sleep.

But you had talked on the phone.
I had rubbed your feet
and threw daggers.
And by the time I was done,
you’d left.
You’d left before
you’d even dialed the number.
I wasn’t asleep,
but I’m still trying
to wake up.