Mental Freeze-Frame

Well, I never did figure out the questions to my answers, but I guess that’s what life is all about. Today finds me living just outside of NYC in Hoboken NJ. I turn 24 next month. I am unemployed, voluntarily. I’m living off the money I made while sacrificing heart and soul for a corporation that used me to further their interests, then was all too happy to buy my silence when I finally got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore.

My last day of work was March 9th. In some ways it still feels like it was yesterday. I have the finances to keep floating along for another couple of months, but the external pressures on me are starting to grow, while the internal motivations remain wanting. Everyone keeps telling me to just take a job and then keep looking. I can’t bring myself to do that. This is exactly how people get trapped in a career and an industry. I had the opportunity to make a clean break from what I was doing and reinvent myself and I took it. If I settle now I fall right back into the same ugly situations I have so recently escaped from.

I don’t want to do what I have been doing since college, but that’s what "just taking a job" entails. It would be the same job, same people, different company. Same stress, same discontent, same ugliness. I want to jump industries, to try something new. I would rather gamble on an unknown job/field then take the one which I already know I dislike. This is the epitome of my personality, and this statement seems in such stark contrast to how the people around me seem to feel. I suppose that is also a core part of my personality to some degree.

Life is cyclical, and right now i’m back to senior year of college when the future was unknown. I was crippled by my lack of decision-making then, and find that same mental paralysis exuding from the core of my psyche.

I don’t want to settle, but I also don’t know what I want. Welcome to the real world.