Why Can't I Find Life's Cheat Sheet?

I don't know shxt, and there's nothing I hate more than that.

Answers are worth more than money. They'd solve all the world's problems. Most importantly, they'd solve all of my damn problems. Every last inner quarrel I have with myself about the way to approach a challenge. Or not approach it. Foreshadowing outcomes before I prioritize my workload. Putting a timestamp on my patience. The best time to take a leap of faith. The common void in these situations? Answers, answers, answers. As elusive as Mariah's vocal prowess right about now. 

It's like, when people ask me what I am, what I do, where I want to be, how I plan to get there and my ultimate goals, I can never hit them with a straight answer in under five seconds. I stop and fidget, trying to encapsulate my dreams and hopes and swirl of ideas running through my mind a mile a minute into one concise sentence. It usually comes out as a stammer of inaudible words, then "a lot" or "everything." 

And to an extent I'm telling the truth. In a perfect world, I will have my hand in more than one industry and will have accomplished a lot. If all goes as I daydream, I will have served as a top editor at a print or digital publication, be dabbling in freelance photo projects, and have a decent side life as an independent artist. I will have produced at least two books: one novel/biography/memoir (when my life story actually matters) and a book of photography. Mind you, this is meant to be in a lifetime, but I can only (prayerfully) see as far as 10 years from now. I have a plan without actually having a plan. So when the question comes around, in a bumble of words, ultimately I want to be a professional person-who-is-great-at-many-things.

But maybe the real, real truth is that I don't freaking have a clue. 


To this day, I still have not successfully ranked my passions and discovered my true calling in life. My niche. I don't know what I excel at, consistently. I do a lot of things (well, mainly 3) things very well. But I couldn't tell you which is my THING. What I wouldn't mind doing forever. I can't pick just one. And I never thought that was much of a problem until this year. I always considered it being "ambitious." There's something alluring about being a multi-hyphenate. Something elevating. Something respectable. But my bubble got popped when a journalist alluded to the fact that it's something unrealistic.

I visited a family friend's church for a special service where an award winning hard news journalist was the guest speaker. So naturally, she urged me to come with my mother to the service to network and hear what he had to say. Before he began his keynote, I was personally introduced to him as a journalism peer. He asked what I wanted to be ideally. Naturally, I paused to gather my thoughts before beginning my "do everything" ramble. When I was finished, he looked at me square in the eyes and said (paraphrased), "I can tell right away by the shiftiness of your eyes and your pauses that you're having self-esteem issues and you actually don't know what you want." Well damn. Then he proceeded to tell me about how lowly one of his mentees thought of herself in the industry and how she's working and still has to find herself. Disclosed her name and everything, and I'm very familiar with her work because this industry is pretty small. At first, I took so much offense to him telling me that within one second of meeting me. You don't know me. You're no shrink. How dare you put a measure on my potential because I didn't fire off one career I'd like to stick to for life?

But now that I'm in my feelings months later looking at all the crap I've done that's really not amounting to as much as I'd hoped, I'm wondering if he had a point. I won't say I have self-esteem issues when it comes to my professional life, but, like Sway, I really don't have the answers to this thing called my life in this time frame called the future. Sorry, Ye.

And by the end of this post, I still freaking don't. Only thing left to do is play this:



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting Past “Should”

In 2017, I sat in the pews of three churches or the rows of fancy reception halls watching two people in love become one union. And for the weddings I didn’t attend, I saw enough of the ceremony on social media to make me feel like I was there, dodging the thrown bouquet per usual. I always wonder if their special day came close to (or exceeded) what they drummed up in their dreams prior to. Culturally, we joke and say that from youth, us women, prayerful brides-to-be, spend years planning for their weddings, regardless of if the husband part of the equation has been factored in yet. We know the style and cut of engagement rings, possible surprise engagement scenarios, the type of dress and hair, locations and venues, months, seasons, guest lists, table decor, honeymoons, you name it. And it’s a fun and wonderful thing to imagine. I love to chime in to the building of this fantasy as, through age, we inch towards their realities. All my life I’ve wanted to become a best friend turned
Read more

"Find Christ At The River"

As soon as the brown heap landed in her lap, Sylvie knew hell could come as quickly as she wanted it to. It was wet and cold when it hit her, splattering into a million little blobs at the base of the white swimsuit making its first appearance all summer. Grainy chunks spread out across wide thighs, over the hibiscus plant neatly drawn around the right one, peppered with pores. It wasn’t even the good kind of sand; the white, wispy, Sandals resort in Cabo kind of sand. It was ruddy, river dirt sand. The kind people who didn’t live close enough to a proper coast had to settle for. The kind that when it sticks to your toes makes them sooty instead of ashy. The kind that stains your beach towel. The kind that when sugar-high kids play with it, it becomes mud pies instead of sandcastles, and when it lands in your lap—the lap of a stranger trying to sunbathe—it doesn't sting so much as make you stew. She imagined herself grabbing a fistful of it into her hands, snatching up the blonde g
Read more

Hinge-Toothed Prophets

He was looking for a friend. I was looking for silence. My eyes stayed low, focused on my hollowing bag of plantain chips. I had gotten the last pack on the plane and the snack trolley had only gone six rows back. Admittedly, they weren't that interesting to study as they dwindled, those salty slivers I knew I shouldn't be indulging in, but I felt his eyes strong on me, neck craned to the left from his windowless window seat in my direction. But I refused to meet his eyes. Doing so would be a non-verbal contract of on-and-off conversation for the better part of three hours and forty minutes. He already told me about some of his whereabouts. "You going to Guyana?" The vessel was packed to the brim with fussy, impatient, slow-bustling, heavy-tongued and sharp-eyed travelers with Jamaican and Guyanese passports, or those who eventually traded them in for matte, navy blue USA booklets. From the look of me, I would be exiting the plane in Kingston, just like from the look
Read more