Still essaying to be happy. ( J'essaie être heuruese.)

"I have two degrees and I don't even know what I want to be when I grow up yet!" I keep hearing myself say that self-aware, self-deprecating, line over and over recently.  I say it in bars while holding an over priced glass of well gin in my hand, I said it walking down the street on my way to a music festival over the weekend, I just keep saying it.  And it's not even entirely true.  I think it wold be easier to fix the vague, but definite problem of my evolving but perhaps also stagnating life if I really didn't know what I want to be when I grow up.  I have a Bachelor's degree in Fiction Writing with a minor in Gender Studies.  I have a certificate in French language.  And I just received my MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing--for which I wrote the better (worse?) half a memoir. I know exactly what I want to be when I grow up.  I want to be a recognizably successful author of a couple memoirs, a novel, an essay collection, and some sort of David-Sheilds-esque post post modern artistic contemplation on the meaning of writing.  I want to be the kind of person who inspires other people to think.  I want to never ever stop thinking.  I want to sit at my very own cluttered writing desk for hours at a time and then take long walks discussing the evolution of plot with someone I love, in the evening when the sky is purple and orange and there are cicadas whirring in the trees and a slight breeze cooling the  moisture that collects the back of our necks.  I want to really care about things like poverty and gender politics and Love.  What I am really saying is that when I grow up, I want to be happy.  

In a way, getting my MFA, was a stubborn, two-year refusal to grow up.  It was like digging my feet into the ground and insisting on staying put in that youthful time of sitting around in humanities courses, doing some serious critical thinking about life, love and third world countries. Now that I have graduated, I get the feeling that my growth has been stunted.  I notice former high school classmates getting married, having babies, living in houses of their very own, and taking vacations to Mexican with their husbands.  Meanwhile, I am here in New York living in a dirty apartment that I share with two girls who are virtually strangers to me, where I have never cooked a meal and where I still keep most of my clothes in suitcases and boxes.  I work a job that pays me less than I made standing on the street raising money and awareness for Planned Parenthood when I was nineteen.  And in past job interviews I was told that I was far too educated.  And I tell myself that it's all fine because this no more a real life than being fourteen and living in a bedroom across the hall from my mother was. 

I know people who have jobs where they work hard and hope to climb up that good old corporate ladder.  I know people who, unlike myself, don't feel like they're playing a part in a school play when they put on a suit for a job interview and say things like, "Being highly organized makes me feel empowered."  But every time I walk through the office I work in, past the rows and rows of twenty-somethings dressed in chic business attire, sitting in their cubicles, I wish I believed in God so I could ask someone to save my soul.  But I don't, so I write instead.  And sometimes I feel a sense of guilt for not taking my job seriously.  I pretend to be writing an email, when really I am writing a blog post.  I copy edit employee handbooks and file stock option letters.  I go through the motions of working but my mind is never present.  Sometimes it traces pretty memories and contemplates the meaning of love. Sometimes it turns off and I float through the day, unconscious, retaining nothing because nothing is worthwhile accept the paycheck I will receive and the friends I will spend it with.  And I wonder if everyone is like me---just floating through their days.  And I wonder if they want to be happy when they grow up.  I wonder if they feel grown up.  And then I worry that everyone else in those cubicles and chic pant suits IS happy.  I wonder if happiness is a word with a meaning that doesn't directly translate from one person to the other.  And that is why I wanted to get an MFA, because I can't stop thinking about these things.  Because I don't want to ever stop thinking about these things.  I don't want to be a writer because I am profoundly interested in telling stories.  I want to be a writer because telling stories requires one to think about life and love and how people interact and that's all that really makes me happy---well, that and having someone in my life who also never wants to stop thinking.

But the truth is that, right now, in my life, I am happy.  And if receiving an MFA can be considered just as much of a cultural milestone representing adulthood as getting married or buying a home, then I'm grown up too.  And I believe I am, sometimes.  I no longer look for myself in relationships with other people.  I am finally able to take people for who they are and either be myself with them or not be with them at all.  I try not to cry about my mindless job too much.  I pay my dental bills and I just got renter's insurance.  I've whitened my teeth and I've used a facial peel to combat the wrinkles that are forming around my eyes.  And I have this sense that everyone I have in my life right now are the kind of people I spent years hoping to meet.  

This weekend, slightly drunk under the hot afternoon sun, dancing in the middle of a crowd at an outdoor music festival, listening to bands my brother and I used to listen to together late at night with the sound of cicadas whirring through the windows of our Wisconsin home, I found myself thinking of all the men I've dated, the jobs I've had, the classes I've taken, the places I've lived, the stories I've written and the many many times I've cried.  And I thought to myself: the rest of my life was practice for this moment, for days like this, for all days that might be like this in the future.  It was all about learning how to be happy. Every mistake I ever made, every risk I took, was so that I would be able to push through this strange time of trying to figure out how to have a job (a career?) while not alienating the good people I have in my life.  And maybe that's it.  Maybe if you can think in your head that rest of your life was practice so you could finally start getting things right, then maybe you're growing up.  Maybe.  Either way, I'm happy.  Now if only I could finish writing my book.